I'm sitting here nursing my twisted ankle like a wounded bird.
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​Got a little ambitious last night in my first proper House music dance class.​
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Now I pride myself on being a pretty good dancer. I spent many a youthful night sweating it out til 6am in deep house clubs. Even met my husband thru my fav DJ.​
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Turns out I've been doing a few basic moves wrong most of my life. But if you've never learned how to do it right, you keep doing it the same way you've always done it.
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In my line of work, I see the same thing when I have to use graphics and files created by other people.
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​The most common problem I find?
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​Forgetting to compress images and documents for web and email use. And in the age of vibe coding and designing where anyone can create anything, this matters more than ever.
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​(This email is a bit of a long nerdy rant, so feel free to skip to the bottom to see my recommended tools.)

Why does it matter?

• I recently downloaded a pdf freebie that was shockingly large at almost 100MB (megabytes). It was mainly a text document with a few images. Should've been under 3MB at best. But someone forgot to compress the file, creating a monster-sized pdf that's a nightmare to store and share.
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• Last year I inherited a website with bandwidth issues. Someone had uploaded a giant 20MB stock photo to a very popular post - costing my client several hundred dollars in overage fees every month. Once I resized and compressed the image, voila - no more fees.
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• And just this week I got an affiliate promo email banner image than was 2MB in size. If I had uploaded that image as is to my client's email system, it might've blown up the template since that particular tool doesn't auto compress images.

Not everyone has unlimited bandwidth or storage. You don't want to suck up someone's data to read your free pdf or look at a giant picture of your face.

What do you need to know?

There's two things you need to be aware of - file size and image size.
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Image size (dimensions) refers to the width and height of an image in pixels - for example, optimal instagram post graphics are a 4:5 ratio at 1080 pixels wide x 1320 pixels tall.
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File size refers to the storage space the image occupies, measured in Kilobytes (KB) or Megabytes (MB). A larger image size generally leads to a larger file size.​
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If you're an old soul like me, 1.44MB was how much data could be stored on a floppy disk. Gmail forces you to store anything larger than 25MB in Google Drive before you can send it as an attachement.
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​What I do for image size - For web hero images (the big banner you often see on website home pages) - I never go wider than 1920 pixels. And for any email graphics, I never use anything wider than 600 pixels.
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​What I do for file size - I try to get web images under 200KB and email images under 100KB (1000KB=1MB.) I promise that's as much math as I'll ever get into.

What to look out for

The most common size culprits? Un-resized photos and Canva exports.
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​Typically when you download an image from a stock photo site like unsplash or get images back from your photographer, they'll be large files (that's good if you need it for print work - but anything for use on the web needs to be resized and compressed).
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Anything exported from Canva tends to be huge (if you haven't checked "compress file" for pngs or adjusted the quality slider for jpgs). Even the simplest of quote graphics can be 1MB or larger - a BIG problem if you want to use them inside your emails or on your website.

My rule of thumb?

Get those image files as small as possible without losing image quality.
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While I'm still a diehard Photoshop user to resize and modify images (pry it from my cold, jaded gen x hands), there are a couple of free tools I recommend for quick fixes.

• ​Tinypng - this free site allows you to upload files and compress them (and don't let the name fool you - you can upload .webps, .jpgs and .pngs). Great for the techy and non-techy alike.
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  ​Pro tip: Compress any images you add to your slide decks - smaller keynote/powerpoint/google slide images make loading times much faster (and make your decks smaller to email or share with others).
• ​Adobe Acrobat PDF Compress - Need to compress a PDF? This dead simple drag and drop tool can massively reduce your file size.
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• ​Adobe Express image resizer or Canva image resizer- Change the dimensions of any image.
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you've got this,
Michelle

p.s. Need to be talked in (or out!) of something? The past few weeks I've been helping a ton of folks deal with everything from sticky client situations to massive proposal upgrades to whether or not to invest in pricey programs (hint: I usually talk people out of things they don't need - and give them smart ways to do it on their own). Need a quick hit of advice from a very objective person? Book a Voice of Reason session.
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p.p.s. miss last week's email? Read it here: your new best friend​