In this post, I’m diving into the final Steps 5 & 6 of my free Blog Like a Boss guide, which helps get your blog working for you in 7 easy steps. If you haven’t grabbed it already, you can download it RIGHT HERE. Once you’ve watched it, head over to The Design Space Lounge on Facebook to join in the conversation. Download the blogging guide and you’ll have access to the group straight away as well as receiving a 20% discount on any theme in a welcome email.
Correctly sizing and naming images is one of the most important things to include in your blogging workflow.
STEP ONE
If you are a photographer using Lightroom or another editing programme, make sure you know the maximum width of your blog and export your images at that size on the longest edge at 72dpi. (72dpi is a printing term, which refers to dots per inch. Websites don’t recognize print settings, so it’s important to reduce file size by opting for the lower 72dpi settting).
STEP TWO
If you have a whole heap of images of all different sizes, then head over to Blogstomp and grab a key tool that will help you with all kinds of blogging jobs. Blogstomp can downsize images to a blog-friendly resolution and uniform width. Not only that, it can make beautiful collages with just a couple of clicks. Perfect for Pinterest images and blog posts.
STEP THREE
You’ve got your images but there’s one more step. There is one final tool that will revolutionize your blogging workflow. JPEG Mini reduces the size of your files by up to two times, without affecting the dimensions. With so many visitors viewing on mobile first, it’s crucial to get your image files as small as possible and this tool will help you do it.
TIP: Go for the $19 app rather than using the free online version. It allows you to resize your images right there in their folders.
NAME YOUR IMAGES CORRECTLY
People are searching by image more than keyword result more and more, particularly when it comes to creative businesses. Think about how your images are named? Did anyone ever search for “6993045_IMG_007”. Nope. So however you export or save your images, make sure you name them in a way that play to your keywords. And if you use Lightroom, you can create alt tags and keywords for your images before you batch export.
If you’d like a step-by-step wakthrough of how to batch your images out of Lightroom in the most efficient way possible, check out the video.
ACTIONS FOR TODAY:
- Set up your common keywords in Lightroom.
- Go check out jPegmini!
PS. Don’t forget to add alt tags to your WordPress images.
There is a great tutorial from Cole’s Classroom right here.
http://www.colesclassroom.com/optimize-images-for-seo/
Great tips! I love to use Lightroom to resize and rename my pictures. I find the process really quick to set up and manage by creating folders/subfolders! Thanks for the share! xxx
I agree and the limit file size feature is genius.
Hugely helpful. Thank you!
Hi Melissa, thanks for the great article and video. I’ve been using Lightroom’s print module to make collages for a blog but when I print to file there aren’t as many options as when exporting individual images from the library module. My files are bigger than I’d like and I wanted to ask if I need to import the collages back into Lightroom and export again in order to reduce file size appropriately? I don’t have blog stomp or any of the other plugins you’ve mentioned in your webinars but I’m keen to do it for free if I can. What would you suggest? Thanks.
Hi.
With 72dpi you do not get good results.
For full-width images – we are using DIVI only – we set the resolution to 144dpi and make full-width to 1400 x 800 or 1400 x 1000. In Photoshop export it as web optimized so that it is not bigger than 100kb. Use a VERY GOOD SMUSHING plugin to reduce the file size once again, then you have the PERFECT RESOLUTION FOR WEB. Give it a try and tell me what you think.
STEVE
Blogstomp now includes a function to compress images. It’s really easy to do.