Why my images are rarely bigger than 1200px longest side on social media and my website.

This may be of interest to some people, so I thought I would share why my images on the internet are usually between 800px-1200px on the long side and not bigger. There is a method to my madness, and it is something that I have been doing for a very long time.

First of all, understand the images I generally share online. They will usually be resized straight from camera images, or resized initial edits. Occasionally I share completed edits, and occasionally my initial edits are my final edits! My workflow almost always has me resizing images to a maximum of 1200px, although I do make some exceptions (images I want to print, images for clients etc).

The reasons everything I share is so small:

• At 1200px across, images can still be printed out onto 7×5, 6×4, Instax Square and Instax Mini with no issues. These are usually the biggest I print things if I need to print them out.
• At 1200px across, you can still make and send off for photo-books (such as my projects that have resulted in books).
• Often that 1200px will be as low as 800px because I will sometimes crop images square, but for social media (Facebook, Instagram etc), this is more than enough.
• Photography as a hobby (as opposed to when I’m working), is wonderful, but it is very much disposable, so as long as I have the original size jpegs (or raw files which I save for up to 3 years), I am more than happy with that.
• Helps prevent online theft. Back between 2016-2020 I was having images stolen (I used to concentrate on landscape and local images) and on two occasions people were selling my images as prints. Watermarks did not work, so this was the next best thing.
• Files on the website will usually be saved in .webp format to save space, and in conjunction with this small size, they are microscopic!

Conclusion

It is a workflow I have had for a long time, and next to no-one has ever questioned the quality of the images online. I feel it just gives that little protection as mentioned, plus the images take next to no space on storage should I feel the need to keep them.

I use this process for all of my images other than work, and it is the reason I have not had to expand on my website domain storage! But just do things your way, and hopefully you might take something from this.