10 guides on images
Formats, compression and resizing, and the trade-off each one makes. Guides on what an image loses at every step between the camera and the page, and how to tell which loss you can afford.
Ranked by how many pages of this site link to them, not by traffic.
Measured on the resizer itself: Fill is a centre crop with no focal point, and a portrait photo loses 38.9 percent off the top for an X-sized banner. Plus the current published dimensions, each with the date it was checked.
Daniel Okonkwo · 14 min read
A JPEG can carry six separate metadata blocks, not one. We built a file holding all of them — coordinates, camera serial, a hidden thumbnail, XMP, IPTC, a comment — pushed it through the cleaner, and read the output byte by byte to see what survived.
Daniel Okonkwo · 14 min read
A photo file carries coordinates, an exact timestamp, the device and lens, and on some cameras a serial number. Here is what is actually in the block, what stripping does and does not fix, and how to verify it worked.
Daniel Okonkwo · 13 min read
The DPI figure inside an image file is a label. It changes no pixels. Printed size is pixels divided by PPI — and DPI, properly used, means something else entirely: the printer's dots.
Daniel Okonkwo · 10 min read
Two properties decide the format — photographic or flat-toned, and whether it needs alpha or animation. Everything else is downstream. With measured byte counts for the same two images in all four formats.
Daniel Okonkwo · 13 min read
JPG, PNG and WebP each win in different cases. Here is when to use each for the best balance of quality, file size and compatibility.
Daniel Okonkwo · 3 min read
Smaller images load faster and rank better. Here's how to shrink an image the smart way — format, resolution and compression level — without visible loss.
Daniel Okonkwo · 3 min read
The two directions fail in opposite ways. PNG to JPG silently flattens transparency onto a background colour the converter chooses — we got white from one tool and black from another on the same file. JPG to PNG recovers nothing and cost up to 11.4 times the bytes.
Daniel Okonkwo · 12 min read
A visible mark lives in the pixels, so it survives every copy — and degrades the image for every honest viewer at the same time. Measured: what a corner mark costs, what a tiled mark costs, and how each compares to metadata credit, Content Credentials and invisible watermarking.
Daniel Okonkwo · 14 min read
Five files cover every consumer that exists: the tab, the bookmark, the pinned tile, the Android home screen and the iOS home screen. The twenty-file lists are a dead browser matrix — with measurements showing what a 16-pixel icon can and cannot hold.
Daniel Okonkwo · 13 min read