When I take a photo with my digital camera, it stores each photo as a jpeg file about 500k in size.  If I am going to put this on the web, then unless the detail is real important, I will want the size reduced, or as some editing software calls it ?optimized for the web?.  It is really just adjusting the jpeg compression.  By doing this I can easily reduce the size of the file from just over 500k to just over 100k without me being able to notice a difference.

The process is simply saving the photo as a jpeg format, and adjusting the compression to something like .75.  If you don?t like the looks of the compression at .75 you can increase it some.  You can experiment with decreasing lower than .75 and seeing if that is acceptable in that photo.  If you really want to know more about the jpeg compression, check out the jpeg faq and specifically here.

Right click on the image and choose File, Save As, like this:

Then select the file format as JPEG, and the optimize option and I like the progressive option for a web page so that part of the picture will show up sooner and then the rest will be filled in as the picture downloads.

You can see the size has been reduced, due to cropping and the quality setting of .75 to much smaller than the 500k that the photo started at, and to me I can't see any loss of quality.

We can stop here, or we can add to the photo, maybe add some text.