If your photos or images are too large, your page will
load slow, sometimes horribly slow, especially on a cellular connection. Photos from today’s digital cameras may be
over 3000 pixels wide and over 3MB in size. So consider saving in a different
format, cropping the image or resizing the image.
See Cropping, Resizing, Optimizing and Save As below.
It is very important that you do not upload a photo directly from a digital camera. An obvious way to optimize your page and reduce file sizes is to avoid inserting large graphic images and media clips. If you paste huge images into any file, the file will become huge.
Some numbers: Say the picture from your high-resolution digital camera is 3000 pixels wide and you want to insert a picture into the corner of your document. When you insert a 3000 pixel 2 or 3MB image into your document, you just increased a file that might have been 100K to a bloated size of over 2 or 3MB (2,000K-3,000K). Add a second image and it is now about 4MB to 6MB. If you use an editor's resizing handles to make these huge pictures small enough to fit on the page, the file size is still 4MB in size, because what you really did was to make the images appear smaller, but they still retain their bit size. However, if you resize an image before you insert it, you will greatly reduce your file size.
Perhaps you might choose to resize a 3000px image to a more reasonable 300 pixels. 300 is 1/10 of the width of 3000, but also 1/10 of the height as well and consequently you can actually make the file size nearly 100 times smaller and it will load much faster!
CROPPING: You can crop a photo several ways. Your Photo or Paint Editor may have a Cropping tool. For instance, many programs have an [Edit Pictures] button which include a Crop tool. If your program does not have a Crop tool, use the Select tool to highlight only the part of the photo that you want (for instance leave out the area below the shoulders and above the head). Then you can then copy this highlighted area and Edit > Paste As a New Image. This will make your face more visible and the file size smaller.
RESIZING: Most paint programs have a resize option – In the most recent version of Windows Paint (Start > Paint) click the [Home] tab, then click the Resize button. Other programs, such as Photoshop, may simply be Image > Image Size or Image > Resize
OPTIMIZE: Photoshop also has a wonderful feature to optimize the file size of an image:
Choose
File > Save for Web & Devices or on some versions File > Export > Save for Web
Screen captures and Windows .Bmp graphics are huge memory hogs. I often tell my students that .Bmp (the standard Windows graphics file type) stands for Big Memory Pig. The Internet uses .Gif (for drawings less than 256 colors) and .Jpg files (for photos with many thousands of colors). They are usually much more than ten times smaller in size than a comparable .Bmp file.
SAVE AS: If you use Microsoft Paint or many other paint programs (Start > Paint) you can choose Save As, and under Save as type choose .Jpg, .Gif, or .Png to convert a .Bmp to a much more reasonable format and size.