A recipe post is photo-dense by nature: the finished dish, the step-by-step shots, ingredients laid out, a close-up of texture, plus a feature image for social cards. Ten to twenty photos per post at full resolution turns a page that should load in a second into one that stalls on mobile — and mobile is where most recipe traffic arrives, usually mid-cooking with wet hands. Compressing each photo to its display size keeps the colour and texture that make food photography work, at a fraction of the weight.