popup photos

[Fergus]

I really like this program for its simplicity. I'm really pleased Xara made it.

I used it to create a simple site very quickly to show family photos of our recent holiday. In doing so I arranged lots of photos in a scattered-on-the-table look. I found a few things that I thought others might have an opinion about.

1. Photos were about 2MB each. So after about 8 pages the bloated file gave me out of memory errors. Xara help suggestion was to optimize photo (via right click), however while this was good for large photos, it mean that the popup photos I arranged were badly pixilated. In the end I reduced the originals and redid the site (it was quite easy since I could just drag the compacted photos over the originals in XWD). Perhaps optimising could consider the popups in some way?

2. I wanted to give all the photos the same size and border treatments - but I found I really had to do each one individually - would be good to have a style or something simliar to simplify this process.

3. When using the popup photos feature, rotated photos are displayed rotated with white back ground. I'd love an option to display them upright or landscape instead. Would that be possible?

Once again, thanks to Xara for a great program,
Fergus

[gwpriester]

Fergus

I just tried this in Xtreme 4 Pro and it should work in Web Designer.

I selected three large photos at 300dpi. Right clicked and selected Optimize photo. I set the default at 96 and pressed OK or whatever the command is and all three photos were batch processed in one step.

[Fergus]

Thanks Gary,

My concern is not so much batch processing optimization, but that when a photo is optimized it is for the size on the screen only. This makes sense normally, but when you have such an image with the popup photo option, optimization also affects the quality of the image that pops up.

In my case, I had quite a few 2MB photos displayed on the web page as 100-130 pixel wide images (the thumbnails compacted to about 10K, but to get reasonable popup images of about 500pixels width they needed to be at least 50-100K).

I guess I'm wondering if an option like "retain quality of popup" or even simply to optimize to the popup automatically to a suitable resolution might not be better.