You paid for the image, but got its shadow!

Written by Hank Castello

My new client was bewildered.  He'd spent over five grand less than six months ago for a professional photographer to shoot all his product images, yet I was telling him his images weren't usable.

Why not?

He'd naively sent the original photo files to his web pro, who cropped and reduced the images and saved them as jpeg files.  Those jpegs were barely two hundred pixels in size and it was going to take four hundred pixels for our product details pages to look good.

"Well, can't you just increase the image size?", asks the client.  Uh, no, actually you can't.  Not unless you want to post fuzzy, awful product images and expect people to still take your site seriously.

What happened to the originals?  In this case, the client and his previous web-guy had a nasty blowout.  But I've seen other cases where "web professionals" failed to realize the importance of original photo files or maybe they were just sloppy, or assumed the client had copies - for whatever reason, misplacing original image files seems to be a hobby for many web professionals!

Here's the bottom line - you can't upsize a jpeg file.  It's a "lossy" file type and will look terrible if you try to make it larger.  The solution?  Fortunately, our client has small products and we pointed him to  bhphotovideo.com where he purchased a small light tent.

After some trial and error, our client was taking professional product photos and in a week's time, we had what we needed.  (He had a professional digital camera).

So whenever you hand over original image files to your web professional, be sure he's only getting copies and you keep the originals in a safe place, preferably two separate dvds or cds kept in a protective case.