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Resizing Images for Amazon Associates, Squidoo, Zazzle

I experiment with different ways of using images, because they get clicked even when they’re decorative. (And there’s nothing like a visually intriguing thumbnail to get people clicking — they want to see it full-sized).

When you grab a basic Amazon Associates “image” code, you get something like:

There’s an easy — well, fairly easy — way to resize Amazon graphics, up to whatever size the original product image is that’s stored on Amazon. (Any larger than the original, and it gets fuzzy.)

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000X1CMZW/ref=as_li_ss_il?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=greekgeek-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=217145&amp;creative=399373&amp;creativeASIN=B000X1CMZW” rel=”nofollow”><img src=”http://ws.assoc-amazon.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&amp;Format=_SL110_&amp;ASIN=B000X1CMZW&amp;MarketPlace=US&amp;ID=AsinImage&amp;WS=1&amp;tag=greekgeek-20&amp;ServiceVersion=20070822″ alt=”” border=”0″ /></a>

See the part I’ve colored red? That determines the size. I haven’t entirely figured out the system, but if you change the “S” to “M” for “medium” you get:


The “Medium” size is a separate image with greater detail than the “S” image file. This is important, because you can’t scale a small image up too much or it gets fuzzy. Unfortunately, there often isn’t a medium file stored separately; it depends on the product. So you have to test and find out.

Here’s what’s really useful. If you change the number at the end of “Format=_SL110″, you’re changing the width.

Default image size (the code Amazon gave you):

Same image, but I changed “110” to “200”:

Same image, but I changed “110” to “500”:

This is called “Smart Image Resizing.” On many sites and affiliate programs, part of the image URL is a number, and this number is a pixel width you can adjust at will. Zazzle has this: it’s the number right before .jpg.

Squidoo’s lens logo graphic has two forms of smart resizing, confusingly: in the old system, the lens logo graphic has a /-1/ as part of the URL, and you can change -1 to 100, 250, etc to select a different pixel width. In the newer URL format which you’ll see if you right-click a lens logo graphic in, say, a “Featured Lenses” module, the smart-resizing system instead has two numbers, such as /100/100/, which are height and width. I change them both together.

Finally, once you have a graphic, you can reset its height or width by inserting style=”height: 200px;” or some other pixel height into the image tag. It’s best to tag an image that’s slightly too large and scale it down rather than vice versa.

There are all sorts of ways to use this. For example, since Squidoo’s default Amazon module is not crawled by search engines, I’ll make a sort of manual one like this:

<p style=”width: 150px; float: left; margin-right: 5px; text-align: center; font-size: 9pt; font-weight: bold;”>[Amazon Associates code for an IMAGE link, but I change the pixel width to 150 and/or pick the “M” size, and I add an alt=”product name and/or mini description”  inside the image tag for Google]
Product name (a text link)
Buy on Amazon button</p>

 

I tile those all the way across — the “float” ensures that they make a neat horizontal row — to  get something that looks like the Amazon Module in thumbnail mode. Then I finish the row with

to prevent any unexpected side-by-side behavior from whatever follows that row.

For example, repeating the above template 3 times:

cat knitting patterns
Kitty Knits: Projects for Cats and their People

Knit Your Own Cat Knitting Patterns Book
Knit Your Own Cat


Crafting With Cat Hair

I’d want to fiddle with the height to get the bottoms lined up, if I were being persnickety.

The point is, once you know that you can resize images (a) by altering the number inside the image URL or (b) by using style=”height: blah;” you can spotlight product images in many different ways.

9 Comments

  1. Emma Larkins says:

    Wow, great stuff here! It’s funny how I always think I’m doing well on Squidoo, and then I’ll stumble across a completely different way of doing things, and I’ll make a huge step forward. I’ve thought about changing it up with some of my Amazon modules for visual impact, thanks for the info!

  2. bloomingrose says:

    Really helpful stuff – even I can go this and I am not a html whiz by any stretch of the imagination.

  3. Wow, for almost 10 years I have been using the default 160 pixel height book images provided by the Amazon.com Affiliate program. I’m in the process of redesigning my online book discussion website and I want to start showing the Current Books we’re reading a little more prominently. But I didn’t want to have to use resizing software. That would add an extra step every time I add a book image.

    Your post prompted me to test what you said and I now can easily change the height from 160 to the mush more desirable 240 pixels tall. Thank you so much for the post!

  4. Digital Dave says:

    You’re an absolute star! I’ve been going insane with this image size thing and Amazon. You just saved me what would be hours and hours of time resizing images and then uploading them and messing about with all the html.

    All I needed was to find out how to resize the Amazon image in that damn unintelligible code.

    Thanks a lot!!

    Dave

  5. Ryan says:

    Thanks for this. Seems like something Amazon would have built in to their associates control panel.

  6. Thomas says:

    Thank you for writing this valuable blog post! Of all the tutorials I’ve found online, yours is the best with easy to follow instructions. In my Amazon image codes, it seems I was modifying the width and height in the wrong section.

    Thanks so much

  7. Kathleen says:

    Thank you SO much for these instructions! I also use lots of book images on my blog, and have been frustrated by the small image sizes. Your instructions worked! I’m eager to continue experimenting with resizing my Amazon images. Thanks!!

    1. Ellen says:

      This advice may be so out of date now that it doesn’t work; I haven’t tested it in a few years. Good luck!

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