How to Shrink Images for Ghost (Or Other Platforms)

This is a quick guide to shrinking (resizing and compressing) images for Ghost, which doesn’t have a plugin to help do it automatically. The long and short of it is that you should use ImageOptim on a Mac or TinyPNG for other platforms. But there’s more detail below, plus some examples.

One thing I used to struggle with when using Ghost as a blogging platform was how to shrink images down to a useful file size. I’ve since moved to WordPress for other reasons, but I need to still employ this workflow for many other platforms.

Yes, Ghost crops images down when you upload them. And since 2023, they’ve added a simple native photo editor. But the files can still be huge. This slows down your website (or newsletter).

I tried reducing the size and quality on my computer (a Mac, so I just used the Preview tool), but I never got things down very small.

Then I discovered image compression tools, and that’s what I want to explain here.

Take the photos of elephants above, for example (which I took on Safari in the Maasai Mara). Here are the file sizes:

• Original raw image size: 21MB (5111 px width) (which of course I’d never publish on the blog)
• Lightroom JPG with standard settings, full resolution: 8.1MB
• JPG resized to 1500px, using Mac Preview: 707KB
• Compressed JPG after ImageOptim (72%, stripping metadata): 136KB

Really, the biggest difference is the one after compression. That’s where I was shocked to see just how small a JPG could get.

Here’s another example of shrinking a file size from Argentina. For this file, the RAW was 28.6MB. The 2048 px jpg out of Photoshp was 1.5Mb. This file is 450 kb.

The impact on page-loading time can be massive. Images are often the biggest files on a page.

My standard process for reducing an image is:

1. Resize, max width 2000, often less.
2. Convert to JPG or PNG, depending on the contents. (JPG for complex images, or PNG for black and white text.)
3. Rename to a keyword-dense filename.
4. Shrink with ImageOptim, a free app
5. Upload
6. Add alt tags and a caption (also important for SEO).

Every one of these steps is important. But the only one using another important tool is compression.

Online, there’s a tool called TinyPNG, which you can use on a Windows computer. Despite its name, it also works with JPG files. I’ve tested both and TinyPNG is a bit less effective (e.g. the above image compressed to 270KB rather than 136KB). I also prefer the drag-and-drop nature of compressing files with ImageOptim.

Anyway, hope that’s helpful to anyone else doing blogging on Ghost!