Photo site is really slow

A quick story.

Last week I was messing around, creating a comic site and adding photos to the site. I had almost completed it when Xara became really slow in saving and loading. Thinking it was my PC, I exited the program and rebooted the PC.
I tried again but it was still slow. I saved often but it took 1-4 minutes to save.

This morning when I opened my site I got a message box that says "The file seems to be empty"

I thought I lost everything. 2 weeks of work down the toilet.
Then I remembered the backups.
I copied the latest of the 10 backups to the working folder and was able to bring up the site.
Thank you Xara for the backups.

OK, so what went wrong? I'm doing a site with a lot of pictures (10-15 per page, and I'm up to 12 pages).
It takes almost 2 minutes to save, and I'm clueless why. It seems to be getting worse the number of pages I add and the number of pics on a page.

I'm doing a comic strip type of site if that helps, where each pic is 1280x960, resized on the page to 300x225. This way the user can click the pic and it will resize to the real size.
I'm using the Image Properties Pop-up photo option.

I'm thinking it's the size of the pics but I'm not sure how to make it work. If I were working on a commercial site, I'd use a small image then link to a large one.
Not sure how this works in Xara.
Is there a better way?

First thing that comes to mind is the combined file size of the photos is eating up memory.

Make sure you have the actual photos in another folder in case you need the full resolution image, then in Xara, go to Utilities > Optimize All Images. You can click Optimize and all images will be optimized at 150 dpi. You can change the settings to 192 dpi to provide a higher resolution for mobile devices.

This optimizes the resolution for each photo and cuts down the amount of memory needed considerably. After you optimize, close the program then open it again and things should be faster again.

I'd recommend splitting your site into a main site with sub-sites which load your photos.

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I'd recommend splitting your site into a main site with sub-sites which load your photos.

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How does Gary do this Egg?

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

How does Gary do this Egg?

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Actually that was my first thought. To create the pages then do an include behind the scenes, but I couldn't find a clean way to do it.

So Gary, what happens to the photos when they are Optimized then clicked and brought to full resolution? Do they look blurry? I'll copy the project then try it out this afternoon, but I'm fearing that I may have to code the site by hand.

You don't need to do any coding. Digital photos imported into Xara can have very high resolutions. But when you optimize the photo to 96dpi (Windows screen resolution) you have not really lost any of the detail. But you have reduced the file size of the image.

When you have a lot of images that are not optimized in a gallery, the combined file size can grow very quickly and as you have observed, slow down the program. And take a long time to save because even though the images are going to publish at 96 or 192dpi, for the web and for mobile devices, the images in your document in many cases have high resolutions.

In my example, because you are viewing this on your monitor, there is really no discernible difference.

As I mentioned previously however, make sure you keep a high resolution photo in a folder in case you want to create a print document that requires higher resolution. But for the web and mobile devices, you don't need all the extra resolution.

Does this make sense?

Another method I use for picture-intensive sites is to create a sized box for an image and in its Placeholder paste the full URL of the image into the Replace with graphics file textbox.

It requires planning and the means to upload images to a separate Images folder using FTP rather than relying on Xara to store the images directly.
Make sure you have the Regenerate option unticked.

For me, the major benefit is the image retains its original filename.

Acorn

Ok, I'm back at this. Thank you all for the help.
Acorn, I'm liking your approach too because then I don't have to load and save all the photos. I can upload them as I please.

Gary, you mentioned macking a backup of the photos before optimizing them. Where are they kept after importing them.
Might be a stupid question but when I look in the Bipmap gallery they are all there but I don't see a path to a folder. Does it use the folder I drug them from?

When you add photos to a document, they reside in the document in the Bitmap folder. But, if you delete the document, the photos in the document are gone.

I have a 65GB folder on my D drive of high resolution photos such as the cloud photo. Many are in PNG or TIFF format and so they are quite large in file size. But I use a lot of my photos in print so I need the size and resolution.

So when I use a photo in a website, I also have the original photo in my photos folder.

This is a fairly straightforward process.

Ah ok, same as I have. So if I optimize the pictures in Xara, it won't touch the original photos in the folder where I got them from, only in the Xara document. then I'm all good.
In my case, all of the photos are already set at 72dpi before I imported them.
They are 1024 x 768 renders.

So try Optimizing All Photos and see if your speed problem goes away.

Here's an example I'd use to create multiple sub-site

Edit: Changed link url

Not sure if the dropbox link is working correctly but here's the site live with sub sites.

Doing it this way can be very simple as you only neen to have one sub-site open at a time to edit it, not many pages with many large images. To create another sub-site, just copy a current one into a new sub-folder and change the images. http://www.parkeston.com/!-multi-site/index.htm

LINK

Sorry it's taking me so long to get back here but in the middle of all this I got bronchitis. been sick for a few weeks.

I tried Optimizing All Photos, and it only did 3 of them. I guess the others were ok. Still the same thing. Slow and 2 minutes for saving, so I'm going down the path of trying the placeholder and the multiple sites to see which one works.
I'm also writing the site with html/css from scratch with Bootstrap which I use in work to see which method I like the best.

Thanks to all for your help.

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I'm also writing the site with html/css from scratch with Bootstrap which I use in work to see which method I like the best.

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You cannot do this with Xara. You can add script and code to the page/site HTML using placeholders but if you simply edit the HTML documents you will lose all the changes the next time you preview or publish. Xara web solutions are WYSIWYG. They are not HTML editors.

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

You cannot do this with Xara. You can add script and code to the page/site HTML using placeholders but if you simply edit the HTML documents you will lose all the changes the next time you preview or publish. Xara web solutions are WYSIWYG. They are not HTML editors.

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Gary Pr, I read this as Gary Pa is handcrafting his own Boostrap website.

Acorn

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Originally Posted by gwpriester

You cannot do this with Xara. You can add script and code to the page/site HTML using placeholders but if you simply edit the HTML documents you will lose all the changes the next time you preview or publish. Xara web solutions are WYSIWYG. They are not HTML editors.

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Yup, found that out. I'm using Brackets to write it. At work we use Visual Studio Code but it's messy because you need a full web server to see the result, where Brackets has a live preview.
I was discussing Xara with a web friend that said if you want to see the site correctly on a tablet, you have to create a new variant tablet page as I did for the phone. This breaks the site being totally responsive to any device. :(
I'm not sure how this is going to end, but it's interesting because I really like Xara for it's WYSIWYG (Photoshop) UI.