What's the best way to show web images in Xara?

Hello All

I'm currently looking at Xara Web Pro to build a website to display my online web comics.
What is the best way to show images to my viewers? On my old site I used a plugin called LightBox that gave you a modal view of the image when you clicked on it, but now I need a mobile solution, that can be zoomed and panned by the device.

Do I embed the comic picture in text then when clicked on, creating a full screen popup layer?
Do I just resize the picture the full size of the page?

It's not really a slide show, unless I can control it with a right arrow. I was showing 1 panel at a time but I may want to create a graphic that consists of many panels in a portrait page format.

I'm open to any and all help please.

Thanks!

Welcome to TalkGraphics

Probably the simplest method is to scale your images down to thumbnail size then have them pop up to a larger size when the visitor clicks or taps a thumbnail.

You can do this in the Website Properties > Image section (see attached)

Check the Pop up Photo option and set a size for the popup to display.

Thank you sooooo much! This is perfect!
Just what I wanted, with no coding. Amazing!


Just one more please.

I noticed that when uploaded, it creates a folder with the name of the page_htm_files, and my pics are numbered 1,2,3. Is there a way to name the folder and/or name the pics when uploaded?
I'm used to keeping all the photos for all the pages in one folder. If not I can live with this.
This program is really cool.

Xara automatically renames all images to numbers. This is convenient for creating the HTML document but not good for search engines.

Select the image you want to name, click the yellow Names tag icon, and add the title as filename=image name Press Add. Replace the image name with the name you want your image to have.

Note: Do NOT append .JPG or .PNG to the image name.

Can I ask a question - how do you replace the image name or do you mean the image file name? (sorry if I am being dense!)

Also does the 'image caption' feature accessed via web properties/image/image caption(Alt Text) have any bearing on SEO?

Warning!

Beware that when you give your image files names, the software does not automatically optimize them upon publishing your website. So, you have to optimize them yourself (look in the Help file under: "Optimizing Photos and Bitmaps"). But again a warning: this is a destructive operation, altering the resolution of the images and, in case of clipviews, the size of your images once you close/save your .web/.xar file. This will make later edits 'impossible' (you can always re-import the original image again and edit that).

And if you're using variants giving images filename (via filename=my-photo) messes up the image resolution.

Again sorry if I am being thick are we saying that there is no simple way to name images for SEO purposes?

select the image, click on the name tag and give it the name filename=myphoto1

This is fine if there's no variant, but variants badly mess up the named image resolution.

Thanks Egg, but as the majority of my sites use variants this really is a none starter.

I think that this and the whole of the SEO topic is something that Xara really need to have a look at and provide some guidance/support to users.

It does not compute with me that the image filename effects SEO. This is because image filenames can be dynamically changed by optimization tools and CDNs etc. including googles own tools such as mod_pagespeed.
So in short, set the alt property of each image for seo purposes.

I agree nobbyy. My site will have to have a variant too, so I won't be renaming the files either. Shame, but i can live with it. I'm pretty easy.

Thanks to all that added information.

xara needs a getting started with websites video. Like here's how to start a brand new site w/o using a template. :)

I agree with Sculptex, names aren't a great issue SEO wise, and the use of Alt tags work fine. Even getting Brownie points for there use.

If you really want to use filename=myphoto1 etc, you'll need to duplicate the original photos folder, and change each ones filename to name_mobile etc and drag these into the mobile version, then apply distinctive names. Of course you can't share these across the variants.

I'm not defending this problem, just pointing out the issue if you try sharing across variants.

In case you're having problems following this point:

Here's a 'work-around' if it's important to use named images on a site with variants. It increases the file size on your hard drive but doesn't make any difference to file size on your server:

Hi Egg - many thanks for taking the time and effort in producing the videos - as always I find them incredibly helpful.

I suppose the crux of this issue is whether any (potential) increase in SEO performance would offset the time and effort required in producing variants with essentially different content, albeit looking the same (hope this makes sense?).

Fundamentally if I am reading Sculptex's comment correctly, I don't understand what the advantage is of using filenames as opposed to Alt property.