The Friction of Heavy Images
Whether optimizing a portfolio website, preparing email attachments, or submitting documents to an online portal, huge image files create friction. Heavy images slow down page rendering, consume mobile data plans, and cause upload timeouts.
Downsampling Camera RAW Captures
Modern digital cameras produce RAW sensor files that are often 30 MB to 70 MB each. If you shoot with Canon mirrorless or DSLR hardware, convert CR3 to JPG first using Web quality (80) to drastically reduce initial file weight while maintaining crisp clarity for everyday sharing.
Stripping Metadata for Privacy and Speed
Embedded EXIF, IPTC, and XMP metadata can add significant overhead to an image file. Stripping metadata removes sensitive GPS coordinates and camera serial numbers while trimming unnecessary kilobytes from each image.
Lossy vs Lossless Compression
Lossless compression removes redundant code without discarding a single pixel of visual information. Lossy compression subtly simplifies frequencies that the human visual cortex cannot discern, reducing byte weight by 60% to 80%.