Photo Optimization - Hard Choice

[taylor04]

I have a lot of huge photos that are about 664x1000 and 400-700 kb. I love their huge size and quality for giving my visitors great content, but I also want them to load more quickly and not take up quite as much bandwidth. What do you suggest I do about the dimensions and size, and what program should I do it with? I want to keep it as maximal as possible without going too much.

[moojoo]

Use thumbnails for display and link to alarger version. There are plenty of apps made for this. If you have OS X you can do it with the operating system i.e. core image, automator etc and no additional software.. I use Graphic Converter myself because it kicks arse, but Fireworks has batch processing too as does Photoshop, so best bet would be to search around for something simple and free.

On another note I use textpattern which is a cms and I upload photos through that and you can make thumbnails within the cms itself so that works too. No reason an 800x600 or 1024x768 image can't be of great visual quality.

[Ryan Fait]

I agree with moojoo. Don't sacrifice quality for loading time when you can have the best of both worlds. Thumbnails are the best.