Image Sizes and Resolutions

When preparing your images for the web it’s important to keep in mind the performance and load time of your galleries and site pages. If you upload full resolution image files to your galleries, it slows down load times giving you slow galleries and loading pages. The file size is the main culprit for the performance of the gallery, and the color profile can play an issue in the quality of your images after upload.

We’ll go over this in our recommendations below, but first, you should check out our guide covering the best image compression tools for WordPress.

Image Dimensions

For the best performance we recommend resizing your images to no larger than 1920×1280. It’s important that you export your images from your photo editing software with the sRGB color profile. This will ensure that your colors keep intact after upload. You can upload larger than 1920×1280 images but make sure you’re optimizing the images!

WordPress Default Image Compression

By default WordPress sets image quality to 80% to optimize the performance of the media load time. You can change this default image compression by installing a plugin to automatically switch the 80% setting to 100%.

File Size

While image dimensions are important, the file size plays an even bigger role on the load times of your images and galleries.

Digital Downloads

If you’re offering digital downloads to your customers you will need to upload your full-resolution images.

You should also consider these points before uploading your files:

• Use JPG as the File format.
• Use sRGB as your Color profile.
• Dimensions: Full-resolution means the max size available for sale or download on your site. Try to upload a realistic size, you can use this Minimum resolution table as a guide to provide the correct dimensions, but for example, a 2250×3750 pixels is okay.

How to Resize Your Images

Sometimes you would like to resize your photographs to another size.

1) After uploading your gallery, go to the Galleries section and select the gallery you wish to edit the images.

2) Select the ‘all’ selection box here, or you may choose to select and modify a single image at a time, in which case you would select the box next to the single image you wish to edit:

3) Select in Bulk actions dropdown, the option to Resize Selected.

4) A pop-up window will appear where you can set the width and height of the image. Imagely will keep the aspect ratio intact. Once you are done, click Resize Images to apply the changes.

5) Once the process is complete, you should see the updated image size in the metadata for each image:

6) Save changes and you’re done!