Photographer's Guide to Publishing Work Online Without Killing Quality
Photographers tend to publish at quality settings that would horrify a performance engineer, for an understandable reason: the work is the product, and compression artefacts in your own portfolio feel like a professional failure.
The good news is that the real quality threshold sits well below where most photographers set it, and the bandwidth difference between those two points is enormous.
Where the visible threshold actually is
For photographic content viewed at normal sizes on a screen, WebP at quality 82-85 is not distinguishable from the source in a side-by-side comparison by people who look at images professionally. This is a stronger claim than it sounds and it holds up under testing.
What breaks that: heavy grain or high-ISO noise, which compresses badly and where softening is genuinely visible; large flat gradients like clear skies and studio backdrops, where banding appears earlier; and images that will be viewed at 100% zoom rather than fitted to the screen.
For those cases, move to 88-90. Not 100. The difference between 90 and 100 is a substantial number of bytes for detail that no display shows.
Dimensions matter more than quality
This is the part that gets neglected. A 4000-pixel image displayed in a 1200-pixel column is nine times the pixel data the visitor sees, and no quality setting recovers that. Halving both edges quarters the file before compression starts.
Work out the largest size your layout actually displays, add a generous margin for high-DPI screens, and export to that. For most portfolio layouts that means 1600-2000px on the long edge, not 4000.
Do not serve a 2x variant to every retina device
Photographic content at 1.5x device pixel ratio is generally indistinguishable from 2x while being roughly half the weight. The images where full 2x genuinely matters are those with hard edges and fine text — which is to say, not photographs.
WebP versus JPG for a portfolio
Serve WebP. At matched visual quality it is 25-35% lighter, and on a photography site images are essentially the entire payload. Serve it through a <picture> element with a JPG fallback so that email clients, link previews and any visitor on unusual software still see the work.
Keep JPG for anything that leaves the site: client proofs, competition entries, stock submissions, print orders. None of those destinations reliably accept WebP, and several will reject it outright.
Straight from RAW
If the destination is the web, developing RAW directly to WebP skips a generation of lossy encoding compared with going RAW to JPG to WebP. Set white balance explicitly rather than accepting the camera default — RAW carries no baked-in rendering, so it is the single setting that most changes the result.
The RAW files remain your masters. A WebP export is 8-bit, sRGB and lossy: useful for delivery, useless as an archive.
Protecting the work
Serving smaller images is, incidentally, the most effective anti-theft measure available. A 1600px WebP is fine on screen and inadequate for any meaningful print. Watermarks are widely disliked by clients and trivially removed; publishing at display resolution is neither.
What this adds up to
A portfolio that has been publishing 4000px JPEGs at quality 95 will typically see image weight drop by 80% or more from correct sizing plus WebP at 85 — with no visible difference to anyone browsing the site, and a portfolio that finally loads on a phone.