This article is written for those who may not know how to shrink the size and resolution of the images and pictures for your web. It is something that I’ve discovered by chance- that I can actually use what I already have to reduce the size for the pictures.
Why would you want to reduce the size of the photos/images/pictures
1. Enable your blog to load faster
2. Avoid paying extra charges with your hosting company for exceeding your bandwidth
3. When the picture is more of a eye candy or just a little something to visually state a point- but it is not the focus of and theme of the entire blog.
What you can use that you already have: The ‘Compress’ feature of your Microsoft Office Picture Manager (the one you use to open your pictures).
Below is the picture that I have taken when I visited Sri Lanka in 2006. That time, I did not know how to use my camera- so a lot of the pictures were huge size- in Megabytes. When I set up my Sri Lanka travel blog, WordPress do not allow me to upload the photo because the upload size is too huge. Yes, I know there is a way around it but even if you get the image uploaded by changing the access file, the pictures will cause your site to take forever to load. And your visitors ain’t sticking around to wait.
How to Reduce the Image Size using Microsoft Photo Office Manager
Once you are used to shrinking the images, it takes only a short time 🙂
1. First, let me show you the size- you can see that the original picture is 2.92 MB. The original photo is clear and huge.
2. Open the image using Microsoft Photo Editor- for most PC/laptops, it should be the default program used to open the image. If you still want to keep the original image, be sure to copy and rename the file and keep the original image intact.
Click on Picture (same roll with File, Edit, View, etc) > Compress Picture.
3. You will see a little section on the right of the picture like below. On the ‘Compress picture settings’, select “Web pages”. It will show you the original and compressed size (indicated in red below). See the difference? From 2.92MB, it is being reduced when you select the Web pages option.
Click OK and save the picture (remember to save).
4. Voila! See below- when I click on the picture, the details indicate that the new picture is only 33.1KB. 
Hopes this helps. Unless you sell photos/images online, you may not really need high image resolution. Most important, ensure that your web/blog pages do not take ages to load because of your high quality images. To find out, your page load time, test it on different computers, use Google Webmaster tool (it’s free by Google) and install Google Analytics to see if most visitors leave your site quickly (because they can’t wait for it to load).
