Out of Mrmory and frustrated

**petner** · 22 March 2011, 07:22 PM

Thanks for the link. I guess this would help if you experienced these issues of images that don't show or are corrupted. I religiously save everything first and have even taken to closing out the program and restarting before uploading...tedious to say the least. The only time I've changed to a different file has been when something got so screwed up in the upload process that I've had to resort to a backup file. But from there forward, I save everything to the same file and on my computer. Today is a great example of what can happen. I had a late breaking story. I added just a link to the home page and small photo, a JPEG and the upload process was inersting to watch. After I optimized again (I do it each time before uploading) I saved the file and closed the program...and then re-opened the file. I uploaded a bunch of pages and then gave me the "out of memory" error message. Then, just a half-hour or so ago, I had another late breaking story. I added a link and a line or two of copy and went through the same process. This time it uploaded just fine, no messages. As one of the earlier posters alluded to, this is an intermittent problem, and if it's a work flow issue, that makes it even harder to pin down.

**pauland** · 22 March 2011, 07:45 PM

Petner, Xara does a great job for most users. If you build larger, more complex sites, then just as with everything else in life, a bit more time and effort must be invested. Hopefully Johns link will help you.

Xara isn't perfect but the alternatives aren't either. I'm still looking for the perfect program.

Paul

**bjornkn** · 22 March 2011, 09:11 PM

There are lots of other tricks too, apart from optimizing jpegs.
One trick is that if you have several layers of vectors, bitmaps, shadows etc, you should group them and tell Xara to export as jpeg. Doesn't help with memory/project file size though, but could make the site load time better.
You could also convert the group to bitmap.
For some reason Xara often chooses PNG instead of JPG, but you could always go into web properties/image and set it to jpeg.

But with a site that is growing steadily you will always hit the wall sooner or later.
I guess Xara could add some commands/tools to help with splitting it?
But it really isn't that hard. It just takes some planning/organizing, which never hurts anyway on a web site.

**petner** · 22 March 2011, 09:23 PM

Thanks for the tips. If you have a moment, I would appreciate more detail on how to group the layers...this is new to me. I also thought I saw somewhere whether Steve Ledger suggested right-clicking on a photo that I know is a PNG and then opening up the 'name' field and putting 'jpeg' in it. Does that sound right? I can't seem to find his post. But no matter how I slice and dice this things, it appears that splitting the site is the only way to push this problem aside.

**bjornkn** · 22 March 2011, 10:00 PM

The special names are not well documented in Xara, but I can't remember to have seen that you can force it to export as jpeg by naming it 'jpg'.
However you can force it to use a specific filename instead of the standard numbered image files exported by Xara, by giving it a name: 'filname=yourfilename' (maybe with quotes around the filename?)
Optimizing images can be done in different ways.
By using the Optimize all jpegs only jpegs will be affected, but by rightclicking the image and select 'optimize photo' you can force any image to be a jpeg, and at the same time resize it down to 96dpi.
The third way is to use the image tab of the web properties, where you can also force a group to be exported as jpeg.
Making a group is just selecting the objects and select Group (Ctrl+G)
I guess it was confusing that I called it Layers? Just meant that they were layered on top of each others, bot on different layers. To group from different layers you'd need to Soft Group them.
I believe that the entire group is then exported as one image at 96dpi, but I don't think that the size of the Xara project will decrease automatically. Converting it to a bitmap, and then deleting the objects/images will, but then that's not a non destructive way to do it in case you want to make any changes later.
But if a group contains any images you could always optimize them individually inside or outside the group.

**zaphodeist** · 22 March 2011, 11:05 PM

That Sledger suggestion - http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...536#post373536

@Bjornkin - correct syntax is

filename="yourname"

!..BUT..! This will not force an export as JPG, Xara will export it as it sees fit, so it still may be a .PNG rather than a .JPG This is what the image tab in web properties is for

**petner** · 23 March 2011, 12:22 PM

Thanks much for the input.

**bigfurryfriends** · 05 April 2011, 03:45 PM

Hello there - I am so glad this thread was posted. I am just starting my rebuild, and this is right up my alley.

One of my categories is 'dogs', showing about 70 different breeds and anywhere from 5-15 styles in each breed. I was going to section the site by dog, cat, arctic, etc...... but now since reading this, it looks like i should do completely separate files for each breed. for instance /beagle instead of /dogs etc..... seems like a little more work as far as organizing at first, but if things run more smoothly, maybe that's the best way to go in the long run, and might even make for speedy updates.

Just stumbled upon this, and glad you posted - hope all will work well for you !
Sandy
www.bigfurryfriends.com
www.animalprops.com