Png images with alpha in photo template issue, comments XWD

[diana]

The problem is when I mouse-over any thumbnail image, the original/default #1 png image (with alpha transparency) always shows under the current mouse-over image (another png with alpha transparency. How to fix this so it clears the background to white (or whatever color I choose?) before displaying another png with alpha transparency?

Commentary and questions about XWD in general.

I like the templates and the tools for wysiwyg, but I'm not happy at all with how labor intensive it appears to be to create multiple pretty but simple web pages with links to images. I'm a newbie to this software so it might be my ignorance that makes me feel the way I do about some important issues to me.

I have mostly png with alpha transparency images on my web site and up until now, always created the web pages in ThumbsPlus because it takes about a minute or two to create several web pages and jpg thumbnails with up to a hundred png images with alpha transparency with thumbnails and links to every full size image - although the pages are really ugly as all get out. I select a template, tell it to select all the images in a folder and it outputs all the pages inside the folder with the images, with the thumbnails as I like it, not resizing my images, not renaming my images and linking to every full size image under every thumbnail. Great function, poor cosmetics.

I do not find any way to create a set of pages quite so quickly or as easily with Xara Web Designer 5.0.1 now that I purchased it to get the templates necessary to test such a thing. (there's no large photo set template really useful in the trial for this sort of application) The software is useful for a page or two of photos for the family and other purposes like scrapbooking and I'll use it for that purpose so don't think I'm totally dissatisfied.

Still, I have hundreds of web pages with thousands of images to update at times. I need something a lot more automated than XWD but I like the look of the templates. Am I'm truly missing the boat here or can this stuff be automated to create as many pages as necessary to handle a huge batch of photos dragged and dropped to any photo related template, creating thumbnails etc automatically in XWD? I don't want to overlook something that creates output that looks better due to my lack of knowledge.

About image handling in XWD - it stinks for my purposes in many regards. Renaming my photos is a major issue, it should not do that. Adding a tn_prefix or suffix to the filename is fine for creating thumbnail images and is very commonly done with many web photo page creation programs but we don't have any option to force it to do so that I can find. Manually renaming the image is too labor intensive. I already go in and remove all the links to the subfolder so my web pages, scripts and images are in a single folder using find and replace.

Resizing my png images to view in the mouseover frame on a page is ok, but I want the people to be able to be download the original image with the original name too - which is a long filename with no spaces and all lowercase that has some meaning, not just a number. No automated link to the full size image with its original name under the the thumbnail or at the bottom of a mouseover or even a popup window view of the image just makes XWD unsuitable for a major overhaul of my ten year old web site. I was so hoping to be able to freshen up the site when I do my next update, it's so stale.

[gwpriester]

Hello Diana

Web Designer may not really be what you are after.

It is a terrific application for creating small to medium sized websites. But there is not a whole lot of batch processing capability or automation.

That said, you can create a single page with your navigation buttons and links to next image and previous image and then create as many duplicate pages as you need.

If your photos are all the same size you can place a rectangle to that size and then drag and drop the images onto the rectangle (hold down the Shift key when you drop the image). The image will resize to the rectangle automatically.

[slavelle]

Here are a few thoughts for you:

1. If you want to link to original images from your pics, you can just add it to the link field. This is something that you would typically have to do anyway with all but a CMS type application. Since the rest of getting stuff in place in Xara is so much faster than traditional methods I've been using, I don't mind when there is a bit of an "extra step".

2. You can probably fix the transparency thing. I'd guess you should be able to put a white box behind the picture that pops up in the large square. Since the upper left image is the "mouseoff" layer, it always appears. When you mouse over the other things, it is showing the appropriate popup layer. On THAT layer, add the white box, remove outline, and send it to back. This should create the barrier between the popup image and the one on the background. If you redid this from scratch instead of using one of the templates, you could design it so that there is not an image shown unless you mouseover a pic. You could do the same with the template by just removing the large image from the mousover layer and puting it on a new layer, then (assuming you've already removed the soft group) select the thumbnail, goto web properties and choose the new popup layer you moved the pic to as the mouseover instruction.

Does this help?

[diana]

Thanks so much for the feedback Gary and Slavelle.

Gary, I do believe now that XWD won't work for my graphics web site as few images are the same size and there is always a mix of portrait, landscape and perfectly square images and so many pages of images per category. Still, I've already used it for some family photo pages where there is at most a couple pages done at a time and I'm pleased with the results.

Slavelle, thanks for the ideas on how to fix the transparency issue. ThumbsPlus will remain my automated program because once a bit of text is typed into a template for a particular image category (animals, masks, New Images, etc) I can use it for years except to update the copyright date. I'm not into web design at all, just making graphics, so I was looking for something to make the drudgery of web page design easy and prettier than my current solution.

Discussing this here has given me a reality check and a thought. ThumbsPlus can create the thumbnails and a table for me to paste into a web page authoring program so perhaps I can use a template from XWD to create the base pages and navigation around the site, which doesn't change, then use a placeholder for a table in the template and use my TP made thumbnails and original images as I've always done. Won't be any doodad slide type frames around the thumbnails but they do take up more space on the page than necessary. The rest of page could be prettier anyway. I'll give that a try.