Hello,
Very basic question that I am not finding any good answers to when searching. I do find some references to 600px, but when I make images that size they look very blurry. The images are beautiful high resolution and saved as png, but they appear to be getting stretched if I make them 600px.
However, when I make them 1200px wide the looks crisp, how I would expect. What am I missing here, why is it recommended to use 600px when they look bad at 600px?
Thanks.
Hello
great question!
In it she highlights that the recommended image sizes be:
I would also recommend taking a look at the How to Use Images in Emails and MMS Image and GIF Best Practices articles for more information regarding optimal image sizes. We do reference using image with width less than 600px in this corresponding article. This is to align with what the optimal email width we suggest of also being 600px. However, the recommended image size is simply just that, a recommendation. Instead, I would focus more on keeping your image dpi to 72 and having your image not exceed 2000px in height or width; else this would cause loading issue due to how large the image is.
If you haven’t already, I would also encourage you taking a look at our Getting Started with Email Design Academy Course which offers some great insights into email designs and image recommendations!
I hope this helps!
David
Hi David, sorry if my question wasn’t clear. While bad image resolution is the end problem, all of the simple things she mentions in that post are not relevant. I pointed out specifically my issue which is this:
600px width images look blurry.
1200px width images that are the same otherwise, look clear.
Additionally
• Inserting images is not the issue, so the how to use images link is not helpful.
• MMS and Gif images are completely irrelevant to my question.
• I don’t want to take a 30min course to answer this question.
The only relevant link you provide was the one I reference in my original message. However, the merry go round of no answer has completed its full circle with me repeating… the 600px width is resulting in blurry images.
600px email width is just a standard width that’s been grandfathered into modern email development (ref: myth #1 from 7 Myths of Email Development). Images should be created at 2x scale though.
For example: If I’m creating a full-width hero image (600px), then I’ll create it at 1200px. Reason being it’ll maintain a high resolution when scaled down to 600px.
However, file sizes will usually run pretty high for an image like this, so I use ImageOptim (mac app) to optimize—a 1.1MB image will usually be optimized to around 300kb without losing image quality.
If you’re on windows you can search Google for “free image optimizer” and just use one online to achieve the same thing.
Regardless of email width, creating your images at 2x scale then optimizing for file size will keep your images nice and crisp while minimizing image load times.
That is a high quality answer. Wish I would have got it days ago, would have saved me hours of work. I appreciate you taking the time to write that clearly. Thanks for the Image Optim app suggestion, I have been using tinypng for years, but workflow would be faster with an app. Thank you.
ImageOptim is fantastic, especially when you have a bunch of images to optimize in a single session. Just drag & drop and it’s done in seconds. The free version has a cap on how many images you can optimize per day, but I think I only paid around $20 for the pro version. Well worth the investment!
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