Web-prepping images, a review

1. Do you hold copyright or have permission to use the image (including its components)?
2. Have you respected Creative Commons or other licenses? And acknowledged the content creator, ideally with a link?
3. Is the caption info ready to post, as part of the text or via an embed program like Flickr's?
4. Save a copy of your original. Never tinker with your backup.
5. Reduce the size of your image to a max of 1,200 pixels across.
6. Convert to a web-friendly format: JPG (photos), GIF or PNG (line art, graphics).
7. Compress 70–85% (if that didn't already occur in step 3).
8. The file size (not image size: file) should be 12-50k for graphics, less than 100k for photos, unless they are extremely large and detailed (full-post beauties on, say, a pro-photog's site). In that case, 500k is an acceptable cap.
9. Either upload directly or via a sharing site. All these services allow you to select small, medium or large options and align the image. Cut and paste the appropriate embed code to your blog.
   

Remember: you can caption photos with Blogger’s built-in tools or you can get fancy by importing images from Flickr. Keep in mind that Flickr defaults to creating a live entry, so post first to your test blog, then copy/paste the code into your real site.  That’s also a good technique if you have more than one photo to import from Flickr.