Just to elaborate on that responsive design, typically these days (at least for me) I’m required to create 3/4 different sized images for different displays.
Mobile phone, Tablet, PC Monitor and then the geeks do their thing and display a different image depending on the viewing size.
It works particularly well in google chrome and changing the windows size as you get to watch it actually scale properly.
This of course still has its limits as you don’t know if the person is viewing it on a 16” CRT monitor or a 32” Ultra-wide 4k monitor so some exceptions have to be made.
I’d say colour is my biggest gripe with web images, I personally have a 99% Colour accurate monitor which I colour calibrate once a month so I know my RGB’s are pretty spot on.
However a customer or someone else’s monitor, you just can’t gauge how they’re viewing it and what quality of colour they’re able to see the image as – The only thing you can do in this regard is to know your monitor is good and calibrated and trust that alone.
The last thing I’d like to mention is image quality vs image size, the company I work for had just asked me to do a complete overhaul on the website's images as they had found that the website loading time was between 10-20 seconds, this was due to the fact that some images were around 3mb. (Not my fault, I simply supplied what was requested, very high-quality detailed images)
But I also didn’t want to compromise on the quality of the image, so we used thumbnails at around 100kb then when you click the product a slightly bigger thumbnail appears at around 300kb then when you want to zoom in a 3rd image is used at around 1mb.
Page loading is very important, look at Amazon for instance – Go and save one of the images on their images and you’ll see how much they can squeeze into 300kb, it’s really impressive. I think I had read somewhere that they’d done research and found that a 1-second page load lost them $1.6 billion over a year.
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