If you want to use your image online somewhere such as social media or on your website, you'll find that the image file that comes out of your camera can be quite large and may not be in a format compatible with the Internet.

To prepare an image to be posted online you'll want to do a few things first.

Edit Your Image

Get your image looking as good as possible. Once you release it to the Internet it's too late. You don't want to keep telling folks that it would look better if you just had time to edit it.

Add Metadata to Your Image

Metadata is information about information. In our case, it's information about the image. This can include the Title, Caption and copyright information. Metadata is included in the actual image file so it moves around the internet with the image. Some applications, like the one we use for our website, can use this information when displaying the image.

[See Adding Metadata in Lightroom]
[See Adding Metadata in Photoshop Bridge]

Our website software will read the Title and Caption metadata and display it along with the image in any gallery we create. This saves us a lot of time when building web pages. Unfortunately, one field our web development software doesn't read is the copyright information. For that, we recommend that you include it in a watermark on the image.

Export Your Image as a JPG or PNG File

Image files straight out of the camera are not quite ready for the Internet - especially if you shoot RAW files. Use your file management software to export the image. For posting to social media, our website or blog we've standardized on exporting JPG files with the longest dimension of 800 pixels. From time to time, we may need something larger but this works well for us.