Sometimes, the photos uploaded into the Property Edit Form for a listing need to be re-sized or compressed in order to properly display in your marketing materials. Here are some helpful tips to ensure that you are getting the best photo quality in Buildout.
Image File Types
Both PNG and JPG files are supported in Buildout. That being said, our recommendation is to use PNG files instead of JPG files whenever possible. This is because JPG files uploaded into the Property Edit Form beyond the recommended size limit may be resized automatically when saving the form, causing a loss of quality. A workaround for this can be to convert the image from JPG to PNG, which tends to maintain quality even when the form is saved.
Ideal Photo Size
Uploaded photos in Buildout should ideally be at least 1000x1000 and roughly square in shape. The subject of the photo should be in the center. Photos in Buildout get displayed in a variety of ways, from thumbnails and small images in emails to big blow-ups in documents. Since all of these uses have different aspect ratios, providing a large photo with the subject in the center should make the photo look good regardless of its placement.
Size Limits
When uploading images to the "Media" section of the Property Edit Form, we suggest keeping the image under the size of 256 MB.
The ideal sizes of a site plan image for the Site Plans Power Page are:
- Non-Bleed: 560x977
- Full Bleed: 560x1056
Resizing
Resizing is what happens when a large, high-quality image with a lot of pixels is scaled down to accommodate the maximum parameters for usability within Buildout. Buildout will do this as needed for certain photos if the pixel count limit is exceeded. Large images will be resized to fit within 2500x2500 px.
Compression
Compression is what happens when a file size is reduced in order to speed up load times on a web browser. The higher quality and size of a photo, the bigger the file size, which leads to longer loading and downloading times. Depending on your email provider, there may also be a limit as to how large a file you can send. Compressing the file, or sending a direct link to the file, is a possible workaround for this.
In general, Buildout does not compress photos, whether they're uploaded into the Property Edit Form or directly into a document. If you find suspect that large photos might be slowing down your property websites and/or documents, we recommend using a compression website such as smallpdf.com to see if compressing the photos makes a difference.
