14000 Pictures in a Free WordPress account

Well, with this I have probably attracted the attention of some ‘free WordPress’ users, and many will probably think that this is completely fake, well, the header picture is indeed photoshopped, but the claim is not completely impossible, although an average of 7 a 8000 pictures is probably more feasible. Suppose you post one photo every day, seven days a week and therefore three hundred and sixty-five photos per year – I will do the math for you : it will last you 21.92 years ! However, that is if you are the lucky owner of a 3GB website. Nowadays, new Free WordPress users have to do with 1GB of web space.

I’ve been thinking about writing something about this subject for some time, but when I heard about the 1GB web space for new users, it was a good reason for me to see what is actually possible on a free account.

And that was the reason for the many same pictures in my article about the Great Tit at La Gallerie.

First a few examples and figures:

My own site Open Source Photograpy and La Gallerie Media Library today :

Open Source Photography currently has 2254 pictures in the library, with a total of 639 MB and 21% of the site capacity. The average storage space of each picture is approx 284 kb. OSP has been online for just over four years and a few months.

La Gallerie currently has 1917 pictures in the library, with a total of 822.7 MB and 27% of the site capacity. The average storage space of each picture is approx 429 kb. I have been online with this gallery for almost five years.

To reach a volume of 14,000 pictures on a 3GB site, each photo must not exceed 218 kb. That is not entirely impossible, as you will discover later in this article.

Assuming I continue in the same way, I will eventually reach approximately 8000 pictures over a period of 10 to 15 years. and all with one Free WordPress website !

And that includes articles that need much more space, admittedly I don’t publish every day, and certainly not 365 times a year. But that is made up for, or rather used up, by articles with more and much larger pictures in storage space and pixels. The article below, for example, contains a total of five pictures including the header, the photos are all of higher resolution (4608 x 2592 px) and a total of 4.4 MB.

The Moon article below, consisting of two pictures of a normal resolution (1920 x 1080 px), is only 110 kb in size. And so my average remains under 500 kb.

Just a quick quick note about the resolution of your computer or portable. Statistics in a well-known tech review website state that almost 70% of Windows users with a portable laptop have a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 px and 15″ or 16″. If you have a larger external screen, it can still have the same resolution.

Nowadays you come across more 4K screens. My daughter recently bought a new Macbook Pro, a real graphics monster, and it had a resolution of 3456 x 2234 px. We compared them side by side, and even though my modest portable is only 15″ HD, it was not inferior to the Mac, especially not with various photo sites such as Flickr, 500px and many other, differences were either difficult to see or negligible – that is, until the moment that she started a 6K video and showed extremely large pictures from a medium format camera – Then my Dell couldn’t keep up anymore, and the difference became painfully clear 🙂

The moral of the story is that HD or 1920 x 1080 px is usually enough. But you can do even more to have small pictures, without really losing visual quality.

In the three galleries below you will find six pictures, two each with the same resolution but saved in different compression – 70% and 100% – try to see the difference :

Above the pictures are 1920 x 1080 px – HD quality, but the left one is only 218 kb, the right one is 6.5 times larger or 1.4 MB, feel free to click on the pictures and see if you can see the difference.

In the second comparison above the pictures are 2500 x 1406 px, left 327 kb, right 2 MB. The same here, you can click on the pictures, enlarge them and compare them.

In the last comparison above, the pictures are 3488 x 1962 px, and respectively, left 573 kb and right 4.6 MB. Ditto, click enlarge and compare. You should see it now, shouldn’t you ? In any case, what you will certainly see is that the larger picture loads much slower on your computer.

This last series above of 3488 x 1962 px is a full crop taken from the picture below. The original photo is 5232 x 3904 px and is 13.7 MB in size. The Picture was taken with a 20 MP Olympus E-M1X camera with Olympus 100-400mm f5 – 6.3 IS. I have attached the picture below for comparison at full resolution, but with 70% compression, making it only 1 MB in size :

But, have you actually noticed the difference ? Not yet ? well, one last extreeeeme comparison then :

By now, unless you have a 4K monitor, or a Macbook Pro with a 6K screen, you’ll noticed that it’s very difficult to tell the difference between all these picturess. Even in the last extreme comparison of liliput versus goliath. So, the way you edit and save pictures for your website can make a big difference !

What should you pay attention to :

Never just ‘save’, always ‘save as’ !

If you use Gimp with the ‘save for web’ plugin, Photoshop or any software that adapts pictures for use on the web: always check the settings.

Use a compression of 70% – lower is possible, but with little more gain – higher gives little difference with the original, and the gain in image quality is negligible.

In almost all image compression software you can also set the quality – choose Subsampling 4:2:2 Chroma Halved or 4:4:4 Best Quality – the same here, there is not much difference.

Do not go lower than HD or 1920 x 1080 px, your photos will be really small, and in this case the space gain does not outweigh a good presentation of your pictures.

If desired, you can keep the image data or EXIF, but you also need to activate or check this in your software, which is usually disabled by default like in Adobe Photoshop. EXIF can be interesting for some visitors, or educational for novice photographers. The EXIF may also contain your copyright information.

A little note about Copyright, know that, nor EXIF, nor watermarks, stop someone from stealing your photos, nowadays there are plenty of options to remove them in seconds.

On top of that, the extra work involved in adding watermarks, but especially the (ugly) visual damage that a watermark causes, makes you wonder if this is all worth it. Also know that many companies that buy pictures for advertising purposes, usually add them to an internet search function to avoid claims.

The million dollar kilobytes or 1 GB Free WordPress question :

How far can you get with a new Free WordPress website of 1 GB ? Well, considering the achievable 429 kb per photo, you can easily store 2300 to 2500 photos – not bad actually !

To conclude, there are probably those who think that my sample photos are smaller because I only have a 20MP camera,
well, I went looking in the old box, and found here a beautiful sunset of my 24MP Pentax K-3 – took the RAW version, developed according to my normal recipe at Full Size, resized it larger than HD or 2500 px at the longest side, and this is the result :

La Gallerie

The photo gallery of Open Source Photography, Olympus micro 4/3 system, Vintage Lens Photograpy, Film Simulation, PictureFX, HDR – Photographer : Marc R.