Melon Corporate Blog
Did You Know? How To Re-Size Images
When it comes to creating content for the web or emails, an image can really help to illustrate a point or provide context for an article.
Because they are such common elements, many people think it is a simple process to use images in your email broadcasts:
- Find the image you want
- Upload it into melonMail
- Insert it and you’re ready to go!
Unfortunately, doing this and skipping some simple image quality processes can have detrimental effects on your email - which may even cause it to not be delivered at all.
So what do you need to know?
The most important two aspects of proper images in email marketing relate to the images size. It’s data size and physical size.
Image data size relates to how many kilobytes (kb), or megabytes (mb) if it’s really big, make up the image. As a simple rule, if the image is over 100kb it’s probably too big.
Now data image size is mostly influenced by the physical size of the image - how wide and how long the image is in pixels. To keep things in perspective the average email width is 600 pixels wide so you want to keep that in mind when preparing your files for the EDM.
You can view these image properties by right-clicking on the image icon and selecting properties, or just hovering over the image icon if you use Windows Vista or 7.
What to do if your image is too big.
Don’t upload it and fix it later! That’s a rookie mistake.
Yes it’s possible to re-size images within the melonMail system but there are three very good reasons why you shouldn’t.
- Re-sizing the image in the system makes it physically smaller but keeps the data size the same. This is bad news if your image is over 100kb as too many large images can in some cases prevent your email from displaying properly or even being delivered.
- Some older email clients revert the image to it’s original size! So if you have put an image in and re-sized it to display at 200 pixels wide, some clients will push the image back to its full height and width which will obviously break how your email displays.
The quality of the image is severely reduced. The system image resizer simply scales the image down and approximates the pixels - it doesn’t re-sample the image. The end result? Look at this photo of Dain. It looks like it was pulled from an 80’s arcade machine.
For some purposes this is fine but if you want to maintain a high level of quality then check out the information below.
The best thing to do is re-size your images correctly before uploading them as assets to the system.
There is a free web-based tool to do this which can be found here: http://www.webresizer.com/resizer/
This gives you plenty of options to easily re-size your photo, crop it, add borders, rounded corners and more.
When you’re happy with the optimised image you save it back to your desktop and are then ready to use it within melonMail.
Look at the two images below:
Can you tell the difference?
No?
That’s the point! The image on the left is 62% smaller in file size than the original version but looks exactly the same.
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