[HOWTO] Linked Images: Showing off full photo quality using Steemimg

Photography equipment is becoming ever more sensitive, meaning we get bigger and better photos all the time. That is not including Photoshop work of course, where I know artists whose files have surpassed a gigabyte in size.

Looking to share our work with Steemit, we want to present the best quality possible. But this creates two challenges:

1. Mobile internet access packages are often limited, and not all Steemit users worldwide have access to broadband. These users may get exasperated waiting for their browser to load your art.
2. Images embedded in Steemit posts are limited to about 840px in width on desktop, so your image will be squished into that width no matter its original resolution. Thus, losing display quality.

@blueorgy created a wonderful free image hosting platform that connects to your Steemit profile - steemimg.com. You can upload as many images as you want and organize your uploads by albums and topics. But most importantly - it makes it really easy to post these images to Steemit.

Once you have uploaded an image to your Steemimg profile, you'll notice you have a large number of options for placing a link to your work in your Steemit post:

Usually you'll just use direct links but if your image is overly large, you can choose any of the HTML option links - your image is saved as a full resolution but the post shows a smaller, lighter version of your image.

To demonstrate, here's a composite image of several Tel-Aviv buildings. I was going for the juxtaposition of modern high rises with the older, more decrepit parts of town. They are right next to each other. The size of the image is 7.5MB.

This is the thumbnail size:

This is the medium size:

And this is the full sized image (reduced to fit 840px width):

All the the images are links and upon clicking them you get to see the full image (still in post size). If the full resolution of the image is larger the 840px width you can click it again to see the non-reduced version.

It is true that you do not have to use this feature - right clicking an image and having it open in a separate tab will open the full resolution image you've uploaded unrestricted by post size even if it's not a link, but that doesn't solve the issue of upload time and bandwidth.

Bear in mind that steemimg limits all your image uploads to, at most, 20MB so you can't put any real monsters up there. You can, however, get a really nice, big, detailed image uploaded that will still be displayed quickly.

Hope this guide helps you to better display your work on steemit.