Resize

My Last Photo — January ‘24

Fandango5 Comments

Brian, aka Bushboy, posted his monthly Last on the Card prompt, where he asks us to…

  • Post the last photo from your camera’s SD card or the last photo from your phone taken in the month of January.
  • No editing — who cares if it is out of focus, not framed as you would like, or the subject matter didn’t cooperate?
  • No explanations needed — just the photo will do.
  • Create a pingback to Brian’s post or link in the comments.
  • Use the tags “The Last Photo” and #LastOnTheCard.”

This month’s photo was taken at about 5:30 pm this past Sunday when I was coming back into the house after taking my dog for a quick walk around the backyard. I looked up at the western sky and it appeared that the sky was on fire. As I usually do when I post photos here, I shrunk the photos, but when I looked at the shrunk photo below, I noticed that the quality of the image took a big hit. The colors weren’t as vibrant as in the original photo and the photo was darker. This is the resized photo below.

The original photo is 22MP/3.5MB, verses the resized one, above, which is 0.8MP and 332KB. So I decided that, even thought it might be slower to load and will take up more space in my media folder, I’d post the original below.

And yet, it’s still not as vibrant as the original photo on my iPhone looks. I went to my media file in WordPress and noticed that the photo was saved at 3.2MP (rather than its original 22MP) and at 1MB (rather than the original 3.5MB), so the photo above doesn’t have the same brilliance as the original does. Sorry about that.

I didn’t realize that WordPress automatically resized the origin photo. Did you?

Blogging Platform — Media Matters

Fandango12 Comments

While Dr. Tanya, who hosts Blogging Insights is on a hiatus, Sadje thought that she could host discussions about our experiences and expectations regarding blogging on Blogging Platform.

Today’s topic is images on blog posts and Sadje suggests…

Do use images on your blog, but keep an eye on your media storage space?

I use at least one image with each post I publish. And yes, I’m cognizant of the sizes of my images because I want to make sure that I don’t run out of media storage space in my Media folder.

I blog exclusively on my iPhone. Photos I take on my iPhone 12 Pro Max can be up to 12 megapixels in size. Each of those photos can take two or more megabytes of storage in the WordPress Media folder. My understanding is that on the new iPhone 15 Pro Max, photos can be up to 48 megapixels. That’s huge!

My solution is to resize my photos and images before I post them. There is an iPhone app I use called “Resize,” and resizing photos or images is what it does. I use it mostly to shrink the size of my photos I’m using in my posts.

Let me illustrate. Earlier today I used an image I created using Bing’s AI image creator. When I saved it to my iPhone’s Photo folder, it was 1 megapixel (not too bad), but it would have taken up a whopping 2.4 megabytes of storage space in my WordPress Media folder.

I opened up the Resize app and reduced the size of the photo from 1286 x 1286 megapixels to 640 x 640 megapixels. It’s a snap to use.

As a result, the resized image was reduced from 2.4 megabytes to 57 kilobytes. That’s a huge reduction in the space that the image takes up in your Media folder.

I started this blog in May 2017, 6 years and 4 months ago. My Media folder has almost 9,500 images. Because I shrink my images before posting them, I’ve only used 2.8 gigabytes of the 13 gigabytes, or less than 20% of the storage allowed under my plan.

So, to go back to Sadje’s question, I am not at all concerned about storage capacity in my Media folder. Because, as long as I continue to shrink my images, I’ll die long before I run out of media storage space.