# How Do You Optimize Your Website Photos?



## mertens3d (Jul 17, 2009)

well...hmmm...there's a first page result that has a file name like you are proposing (non-hyphened, upper lower case).

But...is the result coming from the associated text or from the file name. Don't know.

Unfortunetly, Google doesn't reveal all it's rules.

...gregory


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## mertens3d (Jul 17, 2009)

ignore this...just one post away from allowing links.


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## mertens3d (Jul 17, 2009)

here is the link i am referring to

http://images.google.com/imgres?img...binet&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&sa=N&um=1


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## Leo G (May 12, 2005)

After reading a few things here I got curious about my site. I went into my website programmer and started looking around at photos. I only have 3 photos tagged and those are the three that bring in a lot of hits. Especially on Google/Bing image searches. So now I am going to have to go into my website and tag all of my pics so they will show up in the search engines. Thanks for the hints.


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## BrianHay (Jun 17, 2007)

Great thread, it motivated me to do some work on the pictures on my site. http://www.spyderhoesolutions.ca/index.htm Any thoughts on them? I added a page/album for each of the services I provide....should say started adding, I have lots more to add.


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## SLSTech (Sep 13, 2008)

BrianHay said:


> Great thread, it motivated me to do some work on the pictures on my site. http://www.spyderhoesolutions.ca/index.htm Any thoughts on them? I added a page/album for each of the services I provide....should say started adding, I have lots more to add.


Hey Brian - glad you are sticking around:thumbsup:. The most important part would be the alt tags & making your naming convention something you can remember & it can grow with you. 

Now onto your front page - the biggest issue besides being a little hard to read (larger text) & navigate - is no phone number in the upper left (make it big). Remember you have about 11 seconds to sell your company & services to the point that they want to scroll down & browse around. If they have problems figuring out how to contact you or what you do, they will look elsewhere. You are getting there - I would suggest just one or two picks on the front page with you & your spyder doing something that other machines cant do


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## zzb (Dec 23, 2009)

Don't forget to use the alt="" tag. Lots of folks leave this blank which is a big mistake for SEO since the search engines can only read what is in the tag and you don't need to use hyphens there. Leaving it blank means you lose one more opportunity for the SE to associate your site with the keywords you want! Check all your image tags in HTML and make sure they have some content relative to the page they are in and your site. A small tip..


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## RenaissanceR (May 16, 2006)

[deleted]


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## cbrew (Feb 16, 2010)

The biggest thing to improve your photos is to add an alt tag to each one. Search engines do not recognize pictures, they rely on a text description that you place on them. Check out my site and save one of my pictures and you will see how I have a key word in each one. apexcarpentryinc.com


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## Dave Renneck (Mar 3, 2010)

This is an old post I know, but I found it and assumed others may too. Onward. I've used a photo editing software called gimp, it works great and it's free too  Anyway if you download gimp you can load your pic into it and find the "scale" feature, it will make the picture any size you like.

Also if you want to be found for pictures you should name the pictures whatever phrase you'd like to be found for. Like "new_deck_arizona" also you should be able to add an "alt tag" to the pic to help you get found too.

Sorry about no link for gimp but I haven't had 15 entries here yet so they won't let me do it, good grief I feel like a little kid being told no, anyway, you'd probably find it easy enough but I'll say it this way gimp dot com.

Hope this helps


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## 480sparky (Feb 1, 2009)

Dave Renneck said:


> .........I've used a photo editing software called gimp, it works great and it's free too ......


 
Gimp 2.6.

Downside: No instructions other than online. :furious:


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## Dave Renneck (Mar 3, 2010)

480sparky said:


> Gimp 2.6.
> 
> Downside: No instructions other than online. :furious:


Thanks for the help there Sparky, and a dot org too, hope everyone see's your post. You're right about the downside being no instructions but just scaling pictures is pretty easy.


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## 480sparky (Feb 1, 2009)

Dave Renneck said:


> Thanks for the help there Sparky, and a dot org too, hope everyone see's your post. You're right about the downside being no instructions but just scaling pictures is pretty easy.


 
If all you're using it for is scaling images, I'd use Fotosizer. Gimp takes way to launch to load just to resize some pix.

Gimp also only allows loading of one photo at a time. Fotosizer can batch process however many images you want to do, and can save them under a different file and filename if you so wish.



Oh, and it's free as well.


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## Dave Renneck (Mar 3, 2010)

480sparky said:


> If all you're using it for is scaling images, I'd use Fotosizer. Gimp takes way to launch to load just to resize some pix.
> 
> Gimp also only allows loading of one photo at a time. Fotosizer can batch process however many images you want to do, and can save them under a different file and filename if you so wish.
> 
> ...


Sounds like a great program Sparky, I haven't heard of it before but will be giving it a look. Thanks!


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## garabar (Mar 11, 2010)

You may want to implement some kind of photo gallery software where you can set the size of picture you want both for the thumbnail and the enlarged picture. Just a thought. There's alot out there for sure.


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## JustaFramer (Jan 21, 2005)

Here is a PHP script for resizing photos. I didn't exactly write this myself but was apart of a lesson in php photo size manipulation. 





```
<?php
function smart_resample($from, $to){
			$source_width = imagesx($from);
			$source_height = imagesy($from);
			
			$thumbnail_width = imagesx($to);
			$thumbnail_height = imagesy($to);
			
			imagecopyresampled($to, $from, 0, 0, 0, 0, $thumbnail_width, $thumbnail_height, $source_width, $source_height);
			}

			$images = scandir("images");
			$thumbnails = scandir("thumbnails");
			
			$new_pics = array_diff($images, $thumbnails);
			
			foreach($new_pics as $pic){
						//load the original image
						$image = imagecreatefromjpeg("images/$pic");
						
						$source_width = imagesx($image);
						$source_height = imagesy($image);
						
						$ratio = $source_width/$source_height;
						$height = 200/$ratio;
						
						$thumbnail = imagecreatetruecolor(200, $height);
						smart_resample($image, $thumbnail);
						imagejpeg($thumbnail, "thumbnails/$pic", 75);

         }
			//now loop again. printing out image and links
			foreach($images as $image){
						//discard the current and parent directories
						if($image==".")continue;
						if($image=="..")continue;						
						//not that we have and <img> inside an <a>	
						echo"<a href=\"images/$image\"><img src=\"thumbnails/$image\"/></a>";			
			}
?>
```


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## ChrWright (Jul 17, 2007)

*Update*:

Since I posted this thread, I re-vamped my site in Wordpress. The galleries available in my template automatically scale to the monitor resolution of the visitor. The process of cleaning up, resizing, and re-naming my photos has been a major chore. 

At this point, I've only updated about 30% of my projects to the new site. A lot of my old pics had fisheye distortions and other issues that couldn't be taken care of with batch processing (and that I didn't have the software to fix when I originally posted them to the old site). I've been very pleased with how much some of those old pics have been improved with a little bit of post-processing.

The basics of SEO aren't all that difficult--but they are sometimes tedious and time consuming. Google loves uniqueness--and there are significant benefits to creating unique content for each and every page and file name.

Batch processing your files might allow you to generate file names like:

Indianapolis-Kitchen-Remodeling-1.jpg
Indianapolis-Kitchen-Remodeling-2.jpg
Indianapolis-Kitchen-Remodeling-3.jpg
Indianapolis-Kitchen-Remodeling-4.jpg

My approach was more akin to file names that are not only location tagged, but also specific about what's in the shot:

Indianapolis-Glass-Mosaic-Backsplash.jpg
Indianapolis-Island-Cooktop.jpg
Indianapolis-Sub-Zero-Built-in-Refridgerator.jpg
Indianapolis-Cherry-Kitchen-Cabinetry.jpg
etc.

Just as important as file name optimization is making sure your photos have ALT tags on your pages. All of my file names include geo tags--some by city, some by neighborhood, along with unique project details. I have chosen to make my ALT tags identical to those names, without the hyphens. 

My new site dominates most major geo-tagged keywords I'm targeting--and I also generate dozens of results for those same keywords under image searches.

When I was considering switching from an all HTML built site to Wordpress, I toyed around with Jalbum as a way to create my portfolio galleries. Wordpress is much more flexible (depending on your template) and I'm glad I went that direction.


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## ApgarNJ (Apr 16, 2006)

Don't the titles of the galleries and other content on the pages mean more than the file name? I am low on pictures, but as I do more and more projects. I will be taking lots of before and after photos. I have my new site up and running and lately, it's been getting very little hits per day. I'm really disappointed at this point. people say the site looks professional but I have no idea why I get 2-5, sometimes a dozen or so hits a day. is it because i live in a rural area with a lower population than a person near a major city? I have tested out county search names for remodeling using an SEO testing website and I come up pretty good for any type of hunterdon county search, or stockton, etc.

I have not renamed my photos anything special yet but I may have to. I am still burnt out from just getting the site up and going and my free time is VERY limited with work picking up and summer coming. I know there i work to be done but I thought I'd be getting more hits than what I am getting. 

The good thing is that the people that do find the site, stay on there for several minutes and look at a lot of pages. Most are from NJ as well.


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## Leo G (May 12, 2005)

What are you using to get you statistics off of you site, Analyitics?


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## ApgarNJ (Apr 16, 2006)

yes.


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