One of the things that takes the most time when building a holiday rental website is the photography. It can make or break the site, and I regularly go back to clients to ask them for better shots to really sell their property.
One of the recurring themes is images which are too small (in terms of dimensions, not file size) and it’s something which confuses many people. Generally speaking I like to show images as big as possible on the page, usually in a ‘lightbox’ over the page when clicked on. You can see a demo on my client’s website Vacation Rental France, just click on any of the images.
To achieve this, I optimise the images for the lowest common denominator monitor, which is the 800 x 600 pixel screen resolution. So all the images I receive from clients need to be re-sized to those dimensions (or a variation thereof) to ensure the whole image is visible on-screen.
To acheive this without having to individually edit every photo, I use a great little piece of freeware software called Shrink-O-Matic, which runs on Adobe Air. Anyone can download and install these for free.
Once you have everything installed, just use the settings in the screenshot below, and then select an ‘output’ folder.
Once you’re ready, simply drag and drop the ‘big’ images onto the application, and it will ‘output’ your re-sized images into a new folder in a matter of seconds. Genius.
Go on... click it... you know you want to!
One Comment
I think you may have save my life!
lol