Best Strategy to display 8mg Images on Product Pages for Ecommerce

[LukeyJamo]

I have an ecommerce store that has a variety of images including some super high quality images that are 8 mg.

This style of image could be completed for hundreds of products in the store.

Does anyone have any tips on what I should be watching out for here? Is 8 mg too unusable?

[ThompsonPaul]

Hey Search Guys - it's been a while since you posted your question. Did you get the answers you needed or can you give us further clarification of what you're still needing help with?

If you did get the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future.

Thanks!

Paul

[ThompsonPaul]

I guess my first question would be - why on earth would you want to use 8 megabyte images for web display? Even a full-screen image on the largest monitors (2560x1600 pixels) would only require a 600 or 700 kb image. Any bigger file and the user is going to be wasting time and bandwidth downloading and having to  scroll around a massively oversize image. (And don't believe anyone who says the bigger file will be more detailed - simply not true.)

Given that page speed is absolutely critical on ecommerce sites, 15 or 20 second load time or even longer will be the kiss of death to conversion.

The only reason I can imagine wanting such a huge image is if you want the user to be able to zoom in on specific product details. If that's the case, you're MUCH better off using normal size images along with some cropped closeups of the detail areas needed.

Bottom line - 8mb images are utterly pointless on the web (unless you want the user to be able to download and print them - in which case they should be set up as a separate download-only link). Even Adobe Photoshop will give you a "not recommended" warning when trying to save files that size for web.

Paul

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Keri,

that is a fantastic idea for somebody that needs to give that type of an image however I would personally do what Keri said use dropbox, box or my personal favorite share file then the person will be able to download the link of the photo without any issue

However if you're going run this on a website you could seriously slow down your website and that's no good for anyone so make it a download if it is something important like a file that needs to be used or use Flickr they allow you to upload full sized images and I believe optimize them because they're never at-large for new download them.

If you're using WordPress you can check out Zippykid.com go to the help menu type in optimize photo and there is a great plug-in available.

I believe you said exactly what I should have finished with another trick that works for me and misses on a Mac using grabber so please forgive me if I'm giving you advice about something that does not apply to your computer. But use grabber from the utilities folder set it to png then take a grab or snapshot of the offending photo many times this will drop the size down to under a mg. However be warned if you want to have 300 megapixel images for retina displays on iPad 3 you can still add pixels to the copied version and save a boatload of space. But to the best of my knowledge PNG-8 is how you want to compress large photographs ( really all that are going on the web) that way it will be a lossless image meaning you will build little difference and no one else will except for the user downloading your site's content.

Keri Please correct me if I say anything that you feel is sending this person the wrong direction but to answer their question is 8mb too big my answer is most definitely yes for websites I cannot imagine a reason why you would need to have an image that large when compression technology has come so far for instance I use ImageOptim.app  on a Mac however there are literally hundreds of outstanding tools to compress images on the web. Just go to a safe place to download them if using a Mac I recommend Mac updates if using a PC I recommend CNET each are safe places you can actually download free tools to help you with this issue from.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[KeriMorgret]

Is using a smaller image in the description with a link to (and warning about) the higher-resolution image a possibility? That way you're not loading a huge image on every page load, but it's still there for users who want more information.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Yes 8mb photos are very large use a photo compression app like http://freenuts.com/6-free-online-image-compressors/ and a I would use either rack space file cloud http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/public/files/screenshots/ using Akamai's content delivery network (CDN). http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ which in itself is not a CDN  but as far as uploading large quantities of photos and downloading them for to a website it is a extremely powerful tool

or use Amazon S3 in combination with http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/  cloud front you will get the best of both worlds.

To make it simple on you and quick I would sign up for rack spaces cloud files and activate the Akamai CDN you do not have to pay and less you download the file. Making it better for you if you compress your photographs.

Last but not least an extremely inexpensive CDN is CDN77.com or MaxCDN.com you can get a terabyte of space for $35 on each however CDN 77 has more pops and offers more believe it or not for the money

8 megs is to a large especially if you're going to use more than one photo

I hope I've been of help to you,

Thomas