With JPEGmini you can upload your photos faster to your website. This will also help with the loading speed of your website, and with your search engine optimization.  It can even reduce your storage and bandwidth costs.

Bascially, JPEGmini really does put your photo on a diet, and in turn can supercharge your photography website.

JPEGmini comes in three versions:

• JPEGmini Lite – Limited to 20 images a day and up to 5x performance improvement with compression.
• JPEGmini – No limit to how many images per day and up to a 28 megapixel image.
• JPEGmini Pro – Best compression quality and performance with about 8x compression,  up to 50 megapixel images and an included Adobe Lightroom plugin.

Check out this video to see how professional printers can barely see a difference between a full resolution JPG and a compressed version using JPEGmini.

From our testing we are seeing similar results to what JPEGmini advertises their products at.  Huge file size reduction with minimal to no artifacts and image quality loss.

Now, that doesn’t mean I will go the extent that they did in the video, where I’d print from JPEGmini files.  However, I have full confidence in its ability to help your website.

The kicker to the Pro version of the software is that it can handle large images from medium format cameras too.  Literally any JPG file up to 50 megapixels.  So that’s nearly all cameras currently on the market.  Very few are over 50 megapixels.  In addition, the Pro version compresses up to 8 times versus the 5 times that the regular and lite versions can do.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Adobe Lightroom integration is flawless and seamless.  It’s so smooth that you don’t even know it’s running.  I have an expert preset I created for sharing photos on social media, as well as one of for photos being uploaded to my website.

I edited those presets and added the JPEGmini module.  When an image file is exported from Lightroom using the module you don’t even see JPEGmini’s software open.  It compresses in the background.  That’s what I mean by seamless.

So with that all said, I encourage you to test out JPEGmini lite, which is free.  You get up to 20 images allowed each day.  That’s a lot for general use.

JPEGmini is also available for Windows, so Windows users please check it out too.

If you enjoy JPEGmini and want a chance to win a free license of JPEGmini Pro to use in your photography workflow, then enter our JPEGmini Pro Giveaway here.

In my last two articles in this series, I talked about planning your business needs then organizing the structure of your site to best meet those needs. Today, I’ll talk about making sure your site and your images look great.

The background color of your site is important. Neutral colors are usually best, which leaves white, black, and shades of grey. Because colors tend to appear more saturated and lively against a dark background than a lighter one, I usually recommend darker greys (but not black) for color photographers, on the other hand, I think white or light grey backgrounds look great with a lot of monochromatic work. Spend a little time experimenting with your own images and different background tones to see just how big a difference it makes.

Getting the color to appear correctly on your customer’s monitor is a challenge in itself, if you haven’t’ missed my article on saturation loss in JPEGs now would be a good time to read it. You’ll need to accept that, for now, you won’t have an hope of a consistent color rendition of your images across the web, but the ideas I presented in that article should help some.

Image size is another conundrum. It’s widely believed that computer monitors display images at 72 pixels per inch, but that’s rarely the case. In practice, I’ve owned laptops that have varied from from about 60 to over 200 ppi., making a 720 pixel-wide image anywhere from four to ten inches wide. If you want your images to display large, but not too large to fit on the screen, the best you can do is to find a size for the images you want to display big and detailed at a pixel resolution that is less than the size of your customers screens. With displays resolutions as low as 1024×768 still being used by about 20% of web users, you’ll need your own images to be no larger than about 800×600 (leaving some room for the web browser, etc.) if you want to be sure your image isn’t “too big to see” on your customer’s screen.

Where possible, stick with ubiquitous, standard web technologies. Tools like Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Flash could help you solve this problem by better handling scaling of your images, but I don’t recommend Flash, at least not yet. Many popular web-browsing devices (such as the iPhone) don’t support Macromedia Flash, many users have Flash disabled or have not yet installed it. Moreover, many ways of creating Flash sites (such as the galleries produced by Lightroom) can’t be configured to work with your site’s navigation.

Finally, edit ruthlessly. Think carefully about how many images you want up on your web site. As I write this, I’m all too aware that I have nearly five hundred images on my own web site. That’s too many. Most customers will never see more than a hundred of them. A careful selection of the very best of those (as subjective as that is) would help the site, and I plan to make that cut over the next few weeks.

This concludes this three-part series on designing your photo business web sites, if you have questions or comments on any of this drop me a line or leave a comment, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!