When You Upload Photos

they're being stored on the STEEM blockchain. The larger the photos, the larger the blockchain. Since most instances do not require super-high-resolution photos, it helps a lot if we can do a few things on our end first.

Are You Compressing Your Photos Properly?

What about cropping out grandma picking her nose and the other non-essential elements of your awesome photos?

Most JPEG Photos Look Great at 80-84% Compression

Simple photos look great at even higher compression rates. That 20% makes a huge difference in file size. You'll get this option (generally) when you go to export/save a file from your graphics editor.

PNG Files Have GREAT Compression

and everything I save in PNG format goes at maximum compression. I definitely prefer PNG when I need the maximum detail matched with the smallest file size.

What About Cropping?

This is where you take a photo with some information you want and remove the surrounding information you don't want.
Take this image for example...

(image source: http://theundercurrent.org)
Let's say our post required the expression of atlas, without all the world getting in the way. Once cropped, the smaller image uploaded would look like this...
While increasing the image size to 640 wide gives us this...

When You're Able to Present Information Dense Photos

people stop more often and take a moment to absorb it all. A well done image can add significant benefit to nearly any article. Keeping the images small helps reduce running costs and keep STEEM value up in the long run. :)

There are a couple of free editors I use regularly, for these simple tasks.

• Gimp is a free, cross-platform, fully functional graphics editor. Open up your image, grab this tool...
  
  Click and drag on the image, to highlight what you want to keep. Then hit the Enter/Return key and all the excess will be deleted. Click on "File" and then "Export" and choose where and what format you want to save the image in.

• Irfanview This is an amazingly capable little graphics/video viewer/editor for the windows operating systems. I've been using this little gem for years. (works great through wine/linux as well) :D
  Open up your image in Irfanview, click and drag to highlight want you want to keep and then hit ctrl-y. The options available during saving allow you to save in a variety of formats. Again, I urge you to compress your JPEG files and to use maximum compression on your PNGs. :)

  Now You Can Sleep at Night

  knowing your images are loading super-quick and you're wastefully increasing the blockchain file size. ;)