Compressing and Resizing Images

Generally, you'll need to compress and resize the images for your gallery and create thumbnails. All image editors can compress, crop and resize images, but you may want a program that can do batch conversion to save yourself time.

Many adult webmasters swear by Arles Image Webpage Creator. Arles will process your images, generate thumbnails and automatically create gallery pages for you. Arles is shareware with a 30 day trial; registration is $49. Smaller Animals Thumbnailer has similar functionality. A 14 day trial is available; registration is $25.

If you're looking for a free solution, I recommend Faststone Image Viewer – it's free to download, does batch conversion and has many other useful features. Unlike the above programs, it won't generate gallery pages for you, but that can easily be worked around.

Most high-resolution sponsor images are at least 100-150 KB or more in size. To reduce your bandwidth usage, you'll want to shrink the file sizes of these images by about half. The aim is to get your images down to an average file size of 60-70 KB. Individual images should be no less than 40-50 KB and no more than 80-90 KB each. A balance between reasonable file size and good image quality/resolution should be achieved.

The JPEG quality slider in your image editing software is what you'll use to compress your images. This function is usually in the save dialog or hidden somewhere in the batch conversion dialog. Depending on the current size of your images, they may need to be compressed a little or a lot. Choose 80-85 for light compression, 75 or less for moderate compression. You'll have to experiment to find what setting is best for your current batch of images.

Personally, I don't like to set the slider any lower than 75-80 – the output quality will be degraded significantly. If you still need to shrink the file size down, you'll need to resize the images. Set your software to resize the long side of the image. This option should be in the batch conversion dialog. If the images are 1024 pixels on the long side, try resizing them down to 900. If the file sizes are still too big at 900, try 800. I've found that I rarely have to go smaller than 800 pixels to obtain the desired file size.

You'll probably want to rename your output images. This feature is also in the batch conversion dialog of your image editing software. Most webmasters simply number the images consecutively, e.g. 01.jpg, 02.jpg, 03.jpg... This makes it easy to simply drop an HTML template in the folder to create the gallery. Make sure you're saving your output images to a different folder. You don't want to overwrite your source images in case you make a mistake and have to redo the batch.

Creating Thumbnails

Once you've compressed the images, it's time to create the thumbnails. The file size of the thumbnails should be around 6-8 KB each. Resize the output images to approximately 150-200 pixels. Rename the output images as well – a simple way is to append something like "thumb" to the file name, e.g. thumb01.jpg, thumb02.jpg, thumb03.jpg... You can save the output images to a subfolder like /gallery/thumbs/ or simply save them to the same folder as your full-sized images.

If you prefer to crop your thumbs to a different aspect ratio than the source image, there is generally an option to batch crop your thumbs in the batch conversion dialog of your image software. This may produce results that aren't aesthetically pleasing, so the alternative would be to crop your thumbs manually. First, try resizing the width of your thumbs to the desired dimension. Then manually crop the length of each thumb.

As you become more skilled with editing images, you can improve the quality of your thumbs by making minor adjustments, such as sharpening, adjusting for brightness/contrast or applying filters.

Working with Video

You will occasionally need to create short sample clips from a longer members area video. If you own a commercial video editing program, you can use that to create sample clips. Otherwise, the shareware program Allok Video Splitter ($25, free unlimited trial) can easily cut video in any format into equal length clips.

Your sample clips should generally be 10-20 seconds long, and no more than 1-2 MB in size. You'll also need to take screen captures from your video clips to use as thumbnails. There are numerous programs available to do this, including free media players such as BSplayer and Media Center Classic and the free image viewer Irfanview.