Preparing Photos for Blogger With Free Tools Before Upload

Most slow Blogger posts I am asked to look at are not slow because of the template. They are slow because someone uploaded the photos straight off a phone. A modern phone camera produces a JPEG somewhere between 3 and 8 MB, often 4,000 pixels wide or more, and a recipe or travel post with twelve of those can ask a reader's browser to pull down more data than an entire small blog's homepage.

The fix costs nothing and needs no plugin, because Blogger does not have plugins anyway. It is a five minute routine you do on your own computer before the image ever reaches the post editor. Below is the routine I use, the free tools that handle each step, and the one setting inside Blogger that undoes half the work if you leave it on the default.

What Blogger does with the file you upload

When you insert an image, Blogger stores your original file on Google's image servers and serves resized copies of it. Look at the address of any image in your post's HTML view and you will usually see a size segment in the path, something like s1600 or w640-h426. Change that segment and the server hands back a different size. That is handy, and it leads plenty of bloggers to assume Blogger takes care of everything.

It only partly does. The size the editor picks for display depends on the option you click (Small, Medium, Large, X-Large or Original size), and the link wrapped around the image frequently points to a much larger copy for the lightbox view. More importantly, the stored original keeps everything that came with it, including any location data your phone wrote into the file. Resizing on the server does not change what you uploaded.

The routine, step by step

I do this in batches, usually once per post, with every photo for that post in one folder.

1. Crop first. Cut away whatever does not serve the post. A tighter crop means fewer pixels to compress and a clearer picture on a phone screen.
2. Resize to a sensible width. Most Blogger templates show post images somewhere between 600 and 800 pixels wide. Exporting at about twice the display width, so roughly 1,200 to 1,600 pixels, keeps photos sharp on high density phone screens without carrying the full camera resolution.
3. Pick the format by content. Photographs go out as JPEG. Screenshots, diagrams and anything with small text go out as PNG, because JPEG smears sharp edges into a grey haze.
4. Compress with your eyes open. For JPEG, a quality setting around 75 to 82 is where most photos stop showing visible loss. Compare before and after at full size, not as a thumbnail.
5. Strip the metadata. Remove EXIF data, especially GPS coordinates, before upload. Many tools do this as part of export if you tick the right box.
6. Rename the file. Change IMG_20260914_101532.jpg to something like sourdough-crumb-after-48-hours.jpg. It costs ten seconds and gives you a file you can find again.

A typical blog photo handled this way lands somewhere around 120 to 300 KB, which is a reduction of more than ninety percent from a phone original. Your exact numbers will vary with how busy the picture is; a shot of a leafy hedge compresses worse than a plate on a white table.

Free tools that do the job well

You do not need a paid photo editor for any of this. These are the ones I keep coming back to, and none of them asks for an account.

In the browser

Squoosh, an open source app from the Chrome team, runs entirely in your browser. You drop in one image, choose a width and a quality, and see the old and new versions side by side with a slider. It is excellent for judging compression by eye, and slow for a whole folder because it handles one file at a time.

On your own computer

For batches, a desktop tool is faster. On Windows, IrfanView has a batch conversion window that resizes, converts and renames an entire folder in one pass, and it can drop EXIF data on export. GIMP is free on every platform and gives you full control, though the export dialog has enough options to slow a beginner down. On a Mac, Preview can resize and export several selected images at once through its Adjust Size and Export commands.

Whichever you choose, save a preset with your usual width and quality so the routine becomes two clicks instead of six decisions.

The advice I disagree with

You will read that Blogger serves images from Google's servers, so file size does not matter. The servers are fast, yes. Your reader's mobile connection is not, and it has to download whatever the page asks for. I have watched a single uncompressed hero image account for most of a post's weight in a browser's network panel. The full explanation of how that adds up is in our piece on why a blog loads slow and what to fix first.

The other half of the same myth says to always choose Original size in the editor for the best quality. In most templates that means the browser fetches a huge file and squeezes it into a 700 pixel column. Choose Large or X-Large and check the result on your phone. If it looks soft, your source file was too small, which is a problem to fix before upload rather than by picking a bigger display size.

Every photo you upload should already be the size you meant it to be.

Where the photos come from matters too

All of this assumes you have the right to publish the picture in the first place. Your own photos are simplest. If you use stock images, the guide to stock photo sites that will not get your posts hit with a takedown covers licences, and the same compression routine applies to downloaded stock, which often comes at print resolution. Icons and fonts follow the same logic, covered in free fonts and icons that do not slow a site down.

Try it on your heaviest post this week

Open the post on your blog with the most photos. Download one image at full size from it, check how large the file is, and run it through Squoosh at 1,400 pixels wide and quality 80. If the new file is less than a quarter of the original, the rest of that post is worth redoing, one image at a time, replacing each through the editor so the old heavy copy stops being served.