Lesson #08 Thumbnail Gallery Optimization
Written By Titmowse

TGP sites have lots of rules about what they require in the galleries they list. For the TGP owner, their surfer's demands are what drive them. In a perfect world for a TGP owner, a gallery would contain images only. No banners. No text links. Nothing but sweet sweet porn.

Fortunately for the gallery builder, the TGP owner knows that if they listed only ad-free galleries, they'd not get submissions. So, TGP owners allow sponsor ads on galleries submitted and builders have laundry lists of rules to comply with.

One rule that makes sense concerns images and download time. A gallery that takes forever to download makes a TGP surfer click the back button. The whole reason the TGP was invented was because it was a great way for surfers to preview images without having to download them one by one. In the pre-TGP days, most sites would have their images linked behind cute, little icons and the surfer had no idea what they would see until they clicked.

When you buy a content set or acquire free content from a sponsor, what you get are the full-size images for you to use. To make them into a gallery, you have to take those large images and convert them into smaller pictures called thumbnails. Also sometimes, the large images are too large and need to be resized or optimized because even a full size image will get a back-button click if it takes too long to download.

To resize images into thumbnails or to lessen the download time of full-size images, you will need software and an understanding of what TGP owners want from your galleries. They want thumbnail images to be large enough for their surfers to get a good idea of what the larger image will be, but not so large they compromise load time. They want the full-size image to be of better quality and size but (once again) not too large.

Images are measured by their pixel size and their file size. Pixel size is relative to inches. For instance, an image that is 250 pixels wide and 150 pixels high would be about the size of a credit card on screen. The file size of an image is determined by the amount of colors within an image, the more colors, the larger the file is and the longer it takes to download it.

For a gallery, your thumbnails should be no bigger than 125 pixels at its longest length and no more than 15 kilobytes in file size. Your full size images should be no longer than 900 pixels on its longest length and no bigger than 125 kilobytes in file size. All of the above is to give you some idea on how far you can go with file sizes. The game is always changing, it's always best to scope out new galleries listed on TGPs and see sizes webmasters are using for their galleries.

To resize your images and to convert them into their proper formats, you will need graphic software. There are many good programs available that will not only resize and format your images, but can also do the process to all of your galleries images at once. This multiple conversion process is known as BATCH CONVERSION. Some graphic software programs that you could use are:

Adobe Photoshop
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/main.html
Photoshop is probably the most used graphics software ever. Not only can you make those cool 3D logos you see on the web, you can also use it to resize, format and batch convert your images for your gallery.

Paint Shop Pro
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/
Always referred to as the poor man's Photoshop, PSP does pretty much everything Photoshop does, but for a much smaller price.

Image Optimizer
http://www.xat.com/io/index.html
You can work on whole images, or improve the quality of specified areas along with resizing and a nice batch conversion wizard.

To find links to where you can find image software for optimization just visit the Design section of the Cozy Academy Library and the Design Tool Box on Cozy Frog.