Feeling Squeezed by the WordPress Upload Quota? Optimize!

The upload quota on WordPress at LPS is currently set at 40 MB. A typical photo directly off of a digital camera is between 1 and 2 MB, and with newer cameras even larger. Given these two things, you could use up your whole quota in a single photo gallery! Bummer! So how can you do far more with the same quota and images?Photos off of a current 10 to 12 megapixel camera can have widths of nearly 4,000 pixels. You might not think in pixels very often, but consider this: A typical laptop display is around 1400 megapixels across (only about 33% of the width of the photo!). If you are uploading a picture to use in a web page, which takes up only a fraction of that display, it makes no sense to upload 4000 pixels when you only need about 400 most of the time.

Besides photos having a width and height that are way larger than you need on a web page, the pixels are denser than necessary for your web page. Digital cameras take pictures that are good enough to print, but pictures don’t have to be good enough to print to look great on a computer display, so we can also knock down the quality of the photo without making any visual difference to it when seen in the context of a web page.

So, what do we do? Here are two methods to help you batch process photos and make them look great on your web page while 1) making the faster to upload, 2) making the faster to download, and 3) allow you to upload up to  10 times as many photos in the same amount of space.

Macintosh/iPhoto

Windows/Picasa

Updated June 22, 2017