creating a photo website

I'd suggest choosing a medium resolution size, and uploading images at the same size at which they'll be displayed. not only would the filesizes be too large if you upload full resolution, but you would have no control over how the browser will scale the image.

yeah, that sounds sensible & about right. ty. it just feels frustrating, because at the moment it would be really good to have some flexibility. when you upload things to picasa (which i think is a sorta facade for google drive), the url generated includes a number which you can alter to automatically generate a new copy of the JPG; so if you change it to s200 you get a small-ish image, it's like 120kb, if it's s800 it's a reasonable document size & it's 400kb, & so on. i put things online & played around with like, too large file sizes - so say 5mb for very large images - & at the same time that they are, kinda obviously, too large, i feel like they mean that i can look at things on a really big imac monitor at school & they look good & i can see the grain, but the images are resizing (albeit slowly) if i look at them on a desktop. i've been playing with using css to set image widths or heights to a percentage, rather than a pixel #, & i like what it means for viewing a website. if it wasn't for knowing that anyone looking at a site on a cellphone would be just blitzing their dataplan i would probably settle for a slow-loading website right now. i mean it's photos, people can wait.

tbh I tend to dislike super large images on photo websites. I feel like you can't really 'see the photograph' in those cases, but just see a million little details or the grain.