The images uploaded by your clients will easily be the larger user of disc space within your site. With the amount of storage most hosts supply now this is almost never an issue except for the busiest of sites. Even on small sites the size of the "uploaded images" directory will easily outsize the software file footprint and the database size footprint. If reducing the image footprint within the file system or bandwidth use the most important setting to reducing image file size will not be physical size (width and height) of the image but the quality of the image saved to the system. You control that through the following admin tool setting:

LISTING SETUP > FILE UPLOAD & DISPLAY SETTINGS > Image Resize Quality

You can adjust the quality of the resized photos produced by this Software by changing the value of the above setting. That setting takes a value between 1 and 100. That represents the percentage of resolution displayed where 1 would produce a very bad quality of image and 100 would produce an images as best quality as possible and as close to the original image. Although this setting will sacrifice the quality of your uploaded images over that of the uploaded image the smaller the value the smaller file image size that will be produced. The higher the number the better the image but also the larger file size your clients will need to download to see that image. With a smaller image file size you will gain increased load time of your pages and a smaller file system footprint.

<tip c w>Each time you enter a new setting, that new setting will only affect re-sized images created in the future. The setting change does not affect re-sized images already displayed on the site. So to test a newly saved setting reupload a new image into the system. Our suggestion would be to use the same set of images across several settings saves across different listings. Label each listing to "image resize quality of 90", "image resize quality of 50",…etc with the appropriate setting when that listings images were uploaded. This would would give you a good snapshot of the same images under the same settings for each listing across multiple listings and settings…letting you easily compare the effect of settings</tip>

We suggest adjusting this configuration down to a quality setting that doesn't degrade your images too much. These resultant images should be good enough quality within in the full size image. In most instances we've seen file sizes reduced from multiple MB sizes down to under 20K per images with minimal image quality loss. Find a happy medium where shrinking image file size produces lower page download speeds, smaller bandwidth needs from your host as well as less server storage space needed for your site.