HOW TO: Compress
images for email messaging
By Trent Dozier
One of the biggest challenges for folks entering
the email marketing space is making their email
messages look professional with the use of images.
If this is you, you now might be thinking to yourself:
Why is this a challenge? Can I not simply just
insert images into an email and go? The answer
is yes, you can just insert an image into your
email and send it. However, if the resolution
of the image is too high, it causes the total
size of the email message to be very large and
cumbersome to send.
Many people are not aware of the size restrictions
their SMTP server may have on their outgoing emails.
It is also likely that the folks receiving the
messages also have restrictions on the size of
emails that they can receive. Remember how annoying
it is to wait while each message is uploaded to
the server, and then the amount of time it takes
to download from the server on your clients end.
These are the issues that appear when sending
embedded images in email.
There are two options that can help greatly
with this problem. First, you have the option
to use a web-based image, which will be discussed
in another article. Second, you have the option
to compress the images to reduce the file size
of the image you want to embed.
This article will discuss the latter option
of compressing the image by walking you through
an example scenario and, hopefully, giving you
a much better understanding of how to deal with
oversized embedded images.
As an example, I have a great picture of red
sports car that I plan on sending out in my email
campaign. This picture will surely convince my
client list to purchase my product or service.
The original picture carries a whopping file size
of 1.2 megabytes (MB). I know the picture is entirely
too large to try and email in my campaign. So,
if I'm going to use this image I will need to
compress it to make it work.
There are many excellent programs that can compress
your images and we do not recommend one over the
other. Some popular programs which can be used
for image compression include Fireworks, Adobe
PhotoShop and Irfanview. There are many other
programs available. You may even have one of these
programs already installed on your computer.
Please note that this process may differ from
one program to the next, but for this example
I decided to use Irfanview. I chose this program
because it is “freeware.” In other
words, I'm able to use the program free of charge.
Also, for the simple purpose of compressing an
image, Irfanview appears to work very well.
I have downloaded Irfanview from http://www.irfanview.com,
the program has been installed, and I am ready
to get to work. I am going to include screen shots
and step-by-step instructions to make following
along easy for you folks taking the time to read
this article.
- The first step
is to use the open file button to import the
picture. Browse to your picture and click open.
- Now that the
picture is imported, we will export the picture
as a JPEG image. Clicking the save as button
can do this.
- In the "Save
as" drop down, you will see that you have the
option to save the picture in several different
formats. I recommend the JPEG format for this
image because it contains large amounts of color,
and JPEG is a widely accepted standard on the
internet for images. GIF is another widely accepted
format for images that have flat colors. JPEG
is able to support millions of colors while
GIF is able to support 256 colors. Therefore,
you will only want to use the GIF format on
images with flat color. Saving in either of
these formats will technically cause some quality
loss from the image, but that is how we start
the process to reduce the file size.
 Irfanview
and many other programs including the ones listed
above offer the option to reduce quality even
further to reduce the file size. In this case
I am going to reduce the quality to 25% because
my picture was so large that I need to substantially
reduce the file size.
On the right is my picture after the compression
at a file size of 17 kilobytes (KB).
As you can see, our loss of quality to reduce
the file size is hardly noticeable to the naked
human eye. We would have to zoom in to really
see the differences. When sending email messages,
size does matter. If your client needs to spend
anytime downloading your messages it's not likely
that they will take the time to look at them.
If your client lacks patience, then they will
only be frustrated by your message when you include
a large picture. Compressing your images to approximately
72 pixels per inch (ppi) is the answer. –
Arial Software
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