Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/42923
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I sometimes post photos on my blog, like when I'm [blogging about food](https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2048173.html). I've been shrinking the huge pictures my phone takes down to a size that fits more reasonably in a browser window -- _my_ browser window, so far -- because I don't want my posts to require a huge window. Recently I've noticed that the platform I use (Dreamwidth) now has some degree of responsiveness; if I make a Chrome window smaller it scales the photos too, and my posts even look fine on a phone. This was not always the case, and is still not the case in Firefox for some reason. (I haven't tested additional browsers.)

That _some_ sites and/or browsers do scaling suggests I could use higher-resolution pictures, but some browsers _don't_ scale so I don't want things to be too huge. In addition, bandwidth might still be a concern; not everybody has fiber or a beefy data plan, after all. And on the proverbial third hand, there are now high-DPI displays on which the photos I'm using might be tiny (I don't have direct knowledge).

Putting all this together, what are _current_ good practices for photo sizes on blog posts? Should I keep doing what I'm doing, which is to scale down the width to under 1000px (generally ~800px)? How do I trade off large high-res displays on the one hand and smaller displays with browsers that don't auto-scale on the other?

Note that I'm not talking about special photos where I might especially want high-res (like that gorgeous sunset photo taken on vacation or the like). In that case I'd make a higher-res version available behind a click, so it's opt-in. Nor am I asking about print publications where higher-res is important for production values. I'm asking about "ordinary" photos included in blog posts.

Original score: 8