A lot of the pictures on the site are scans of actual film pictures that I took over the years before I purchased a digital camera (which I now use exclusively).

Back when I purchased the "abandonedrails.com" domain name, I wanted to put some material up immediately. I didn't have much in the way of digital pictures since I have not had my digital camera for a very long time. So I resorted to my meager collection of 3x5s (which were taken with my Nikon point-and-shoot), and proceeded to scan the pictures in with my flatbed scanner. Once scanned into digital format, I cropped the pictures appropriately and transferred them to the website.  Easy enough, right?

Well, as it happened, I had a lot of pictures on the site each taking up 1 MB (and more!) of disk space. After further research, I discovered that a little number known as the DPI (dots per inch) of the picture was important, especially if the picture was to be used for electronic purposes. Turns out that computers can display pictures up to 75 DPI and no more. (If a picture has more than 75 DPI, the display immediately converts it down to 75 DPI.) That means that any picture more than 75 DPI was taking up more space on my website than needed.  And there were a lot of pictures scanned in at 200 DPI (and even a couple of 300).

So I've converted ALL my pictures down to 75 DPI (except those that were already); I have also resized all of them to a standard size, 800x600 (or 600x800 for portrait orientations). In taking measurements before and after, I estimate that I have reduced my used disk space by at least 80 MB!  Not only that, the pictures load and display MUCH faster now (as well they should, having been reduced in file size almost 250%).

Now the hard part is remembering to do this for subsequent photos I upload to my site.