# 2. Preparing Picture Files

To prepare your picture files:

1. Figure out how many pictures you will need for the metadata.  This means different pictures for each rarity of a song.  What I do is add a "rarity badge" to indicate the rarity.
2. Get the high quality version of every image for each song.
3. Make a high quality image for each rarity of each song
4. Gather other images, like album image, and artist image
5. If the original image is already compressed you just need to make small 500px compressed and 50px images so the site can load as fast as possible (50kb and 2kb suggested size).  You can also upscale the original image with an enhance algorithm, which might make it worth using for the large image spot in the metadata.
6. If the original image is large and uncompressed, then you will need to make both a "compressed" image (300kb suggested size) and a small image (50kb suggested, 500px max) and a thumbnail image(1-2kb suggested, 50px max)
7. Still Image - If the original image is an animated gif, then you will need to make sure you also include a "still" version of the image, so the site can load a still image in times that gifs cause problems.
8. Gather all the images and prepare them for uploading.

That means you could need 4 variations of a single image to ensure that the right quality image is available for each situation, and the site can run smoothly and decentralized.  It's amazing how cool things are when tokens have thicc prepared metadata.

In this example for a 6 song EP, that has 3 rarities for each song, that adds up to (6x3x4) 72 images that need to be prepared for just the song art.

An easy tool to compress your images in your web browser is EZGif.

{% embed url="https://ezgif.com/optimize" %}

## Video

{% embed url="https://youtu.be/PbVDYcjjxyg" %}
