Saving Images for Web and Social Media

Image resolution can be an overwhelming topic so we’re often asked how best to resize and save images for web and social media.

We post so many images online in our social media channels, websites, and blogs. And while it mightn’t be as much fun as creating images, optimising our images to load quickly is essential. Optimisation helps ensure those images are seen by our audiences.

The worldwide web is full of media-rich content. And we need to remember our audiences may have limited time, internet speed, or viewing limitations, including screen size.

Image optimisation requires:
– image resizing;
– choosing the most suitable file format;
– choosing appropriate quality (compression);
– setting the correct colour profile for web browsers (sRGB);

Our RESIZE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA Photoshop Action Set and video tutorials will help you achieve this, and it’s free!

NOTE: This article and action were originally created in late 2019. The information remains current in 2021 as Facebook has not changed its requirements.

WHY OPTIMISE IMAGES FOR WEBSITES AND BLOGS?

Your digital SLR cameras (DSLRs) capture a massive number of pixels – often from 6000 to 9000 pixels on the long side, depending on model.

That’s perfect for large format printing but much larger than necessary (or practical) for online use. Many mobile devices still display fewer than 1280 pixels.

Therefore, your web galleries and blog will benefit from resizing your images down to an optimised size, more suited to your audience’s viewing conditions.

WHY OPTIMISE IMAGES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA?

Social media platforms such as Facebook impose limits to ensure their platform performs as well as possible given the high volume of data flowing across the internet. For example, if you upload a high-resolution image to Facebook, the application resizes and compresses it for you. However, it doesn’t give you any control over the quality.

Through our testing, we’ve found we’re much happier with the results when we have control over our image optimisation. So we’ve created an action set for Photoshop which we’re sharing with you!

So how do you control what you contribute to this sea of image data?

We’ve created a RESIZE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA Action Set for Photoshop, which you can download for free. The actions are based on our ideal resize, sharpen and optimise preferences to suit Facebook and Instagram. We run these actions on our images before uploading them to our various online platforms.

This action includes 2 sizing options which can be run in Adobe Photoshop. In addition, we’ve added a bonus action which, when used with Adobe Bridge’s Image Processor, will automate the optimisation of multiple images. (See the included tutorial videos once you add to your library.)

Version: This action was last updated in 2019, and still relevant for Facebook and Instagram in 2021.

We strongly advise watching the included video tutorials prior to use. These demonstrate:

• unzipping and installing the action set into Photoshop
• running the action/s on a single image
• using Adobe Bridge’s Image Processor function to resize multiple images
• and, preparing the Image Processor action for use as you are required to turn off a warning we have intentionally included for you

BENEFITS OF IMAGE OPTIMISATION

Without image optimisation we aren’t presenting our images at their best on social media and our websites may suffer “page bloat”. This negatively impacts page loading speed, SEO performance, and your audience’s willingness to stay engaged.

By using our free RESIZE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA Action Set for Photoshop you will see improved quality and engagement with your images across your social media channels and your website.