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When I look at stock sites, they mostly talk about jpeg requirements in size. A full-size image should be about 6Mb etc., but size of the images says nothing ofcourse. A jpeg image with al lot of blue sky can become quite small, even when using the maximum quality settings for compression. Photoshop uses a slider from 1 to 12, my own Gimp and Aftershot Pro work with percentages. I worked with Photoshop before turning to Linux.
I tested several images, placing them side by side and 1:1 or even zoomed in more, and I can’t see any difference between an image compressed with quality 100% or 82%. The size of the jpeg image ofcourse differs tremendously, from 4 to 6 Mb for the 100% images and 700Kb to 1.5Mb for the 82% images. My thought would be to upload the 82% images, because this is faster and takes up less space on the server. But do clients/customers take me seriously when I offer images of ‘just’ 800kb?
What are your thoughts about this and your settings?
Alas, in the competitive world of microstock, where appearances are everything, where we struggle to find our own spot in the pond, despite being lighter and just as healthy, does it aid our endeavor to provide bait that appears smaller than others?
Wonderfull response :). And true. So, what is the compression level of your images? 100%? Or do you upload them as tiff? That would be the best option then. A photograph of 85Mb for just 10 dollars! Wow!
In Photoshop I do the maximum which is 12 – files usually end up being between 5-15mb. Quality is unsurpassed – no compression artifacts or anything. JPEG format. Since you’re using Linux, I would say go with 100%. I tried to carry that same mentality over to videos and it does not work there – you can go maximum 80% or so with videos to get an acceptable file size.
Ok. And how many pixels are your images? 12, 16, 32 megapixels?
These are the different results with a 12MP image from the Nikon D700 in Aftershot Pro. What a difference in size, but not visually.
Mine are about 16 megapixels generally. That size looks about right (12.6 megs). People don’t mind downloading something like that, imo.
I’m a bit late to this little discussion, but I always export my stock photos at 4500 pixels on longest side (resized down a bit to hide any residual noise) and then export them in Lightroom using the quality setting of 90. That usually gives me a file size of 3 – 7 MB or so depending on the detail in the shot. Never had any rejections from stock sites and that seems to work fine on my own site. I’m not sure that buyers can see the file size, can they? Looking at my own site, it gives a choice of pixel dimensions, but no indication of how big the file is.
Steve
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