How to Use Your Visual Content
Your guide to putting your photos to work!
A large collection of new visual content can be a bit overwhelming. It can be difficult to know what format you need, what size to use on your website, or how to crop them! We’ve included our most used tips and tricks that can help you navigate sharing your new images and videos with the world!
PHOTOS
High-Res vs Web-Res
We always send our clients two versions of every image: high-resolution and web-resolution. As you’d expect, web-resolution is best for use digitally. They’re slightly lower resolution for quicker load time, but also limit how much you can zoom in on the image. High-resolution images are very large. Like… huge! This file is best when you really want to zoom in on a certain portion of the image to show off the detail. Don’t be afraid to REALLY zoom in on these because they will still look really crisp and focused. These images are best used for print applications.
Guidelines for Cropping Photos
We leave all images uncropped so you can use them in a wide variety of platforms and usages. During the shoot, we will show you how we would recommend that they be cropped. We encourage our clients to crop the images accordingly when using them — oftentimes, the closer, the better!
Instagram: a slight vertical is best on the Instagram feed (4x5) and a tall vertical (9x16) is best for Instagram stories.
Facebook: square images tend to work best on Facebook but, remember to crop the image for the best composition.
Marketing: We’ve intentionally left a lot of open space in each image to easily provide you with the perfect spot to add text or your logo for banners, flyers, or announcements.
Website: Most website banners are very wide and are around 16x9 but there are variations on each platform. This aspect ratio usually works for email newsletters as well.
VIDEOS
We like to include two different crops for videos because different sizes work better in different applications — a square and a vertical.
A square crop (1:1) is best used for Facebook or oftentimes on websites. We find that a vertical crop (4:5) is best for Instagram because it will fill the majority of the screen when posted on the feed. Horizontal (16:9) works best for YouTube so it’s best to know your final usage platform when approaching a video project.
GIFs
GIFs are commonly used on social media, but that’s not the only application. You can extend their use by uploading them to your website or including them in your email marketing! For this reason, we always give our clients two versions of every GIF because certain uses need different formats.
Facebook & Instagram: Use .MP4 for better image quality GIF posts. Instagram will autoplay and loop any video.
Email & Website: Use .GIF for autoplay, looping, and smaller file size for faster loading.
Interested in bringing your branded vision to life?
We’d love to help you!
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