File Optimization Experiment

Image "B" is the original photograph taken. It is at 300 dpi resolution and is 3800 x 5067 pixels. This is good for print quality, but bad for the web because your monitor displays images at 72 dpi. Image "A" has been resized in an image editing program to be 72 dpi and is 300 x 400 pixels.

So why do both pictures appear to be the same size?
Image "B" may be 3800 x 5067 pixels in size, but it has been resized in a web page authoring program(such as Macromedia DreamWeaver), not image editing sofware(such as Adobe Photoshop). Even though it appears the same size as the optimize picture, it it actually a lot bigger. Image "B" is 4.32 MB where as the optimized image "A" is only 26.2 KB.

So what!?!
It is generally a good idea not to resize images in your web page authoring software. Take care of that in an image editing program.*

*Note: Some web page authoring software packages may actually automatically optimize your images for you when you resize them. This is not typical, however.