Photos or graphics of some sort are needed in website posts and articles. That’s a given. So where can you find pictures? I mostly use stock photos I purchased or some I’ve taken myself. When I’m selecting photos to purchase or taking pictures, I keep reuse in mind. I look for some that I can reuse in multiple ways. It’s possible to crop photos and end up with multiple photos out of one. In this post, I’ll show you an example. I’ll include the original photo I took and some derivatives from that photo. Let’s go!
Original Photo
This is a photo I took myself. That’s something I like to do to augment purchasing stock photos. That’s an approach I describe in the first tip in this series: Build Your Own Stock Media Library.
I reduced the size and added the type, but otherwise left the photo intact and untouched.
Social Media
Every platform is different. Dimensions also change from time to time. As of the publish date, these are the dimensions currently in use.
Facebook and LinkedIn
The image at the top of this post is a wide variation that can also be used in Facebook. The dimensions are 1200 x 900. I made an identical version for LinkedIn using dimensions of 1800 x 1200. I zoomed in on the rose and cropped the photo. Then I added the green rectangle and text. The rectangle is slightly transparent.
Pins! Of course, they’re vertical. Here’s a version I made that I plan to use on my board in Pinterest. The actual dimensions are 736 x 1656. As you can see, I focused on the rose in another way. This time I included items below it instead of items on the side. I decided not to lighten the rose in this image. The green rectangle has some reduction in opacity. Note that I changed the text color to yellow.
Social Media
Here’s an example of creating a graphic to use in various locations online. I cropped the picture closely to zoom in on the rose, lightened it, added several low-opacity layers with a filter adjustment, and added text. The actual size is 600 x 600. It’s good to have a square version of images and graphics, because they can be easily reduced or enlarged as needed. Logo images are often square as well. The Facebook profile image is 180 x 180. Square images are also used on Instagram.
Blog Posts
In WordPress, it’s necessary to include a featured image on blog posts. This image is used by the theme in various ways. It might be part of the overall design. There are also usually sizing requirements for category listings, for instance. On this site, the featured image dimensions are square. On another site, the dimensions are different. Adjust your images accordingly.
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For other tips in this series, see the following post.
