Is there a way to link images instead of embedding?

[Forumarian]

I have large files with lots of images in Xara Photo and Graphics Designer 2013.

Is there a way to link the images to save on saving time?

Otherwise I'll have to optimise all but I'm not sure if I forgot the settings the last time I optimised all, I might be recompressing images again and again in a lossy way which will eventually degrade quality.

[handrawn]

xara does not do external linking, sorry

[Forumarian]

xara does not do external linking, sorry

Thanks, do you know...

If you use the optimise all setting, is there a way to tell it not to optimise previously optimised images? Or not to optimise JPG?

[Egg Bramhill]

Otherwise I'll have to optimise all but I'm not sure if I forgot the settings the last time I optimised all, I might be recompressing images again and again in a lossy way which will eventually degrade quality.

Try it yourself. Bring in a large image, resize it & optimise it. Now optimise it again & again. There will be no change in image quality. Have the bitmap Gallery open & also notice that the filesize remains constant however many times you optomise it. Notice also that it doesn't produce any new images in the Bitmap Gallery. Once it's optimised it won't optimise any further unless you change the size or ppi.

[Michael]

I hate to say it but this is exactly where Inkscape excells. You could try to make your layut in Xara and export it to SVG. Then open it in Inkscape and replace the bitmaps with links to the bitmaps and save it from within Inkscape.

Inkscape saves the file with a link (xlink:href) to the bitmap as you can see from this snippet of code I took from a testfile

(

<image
y="530.30524"
x="81.961632"
id="image3076"
xlink:href="S7300093.JPG"
height="270.00543"
width="438.4884" />)

It sometimes save the link with path to the file (file://"D:/location/S...jpg) so you might tweak your outcome with a text editor. Firefox, Chrome and IE are capable of rendering the file properly. Now you can change the linked JPG and the result will be shown. Xara reads the file AND links the bitmap in the Xar-document but on export embeds the bitmap in the file. That's a pity....

If the developers could look into this way of linking files and make a proper way to save the SVG than Xara would have a major advantage and could be a very good SVG editor.

[Egg Bramhill]

but on export embeds the bitmap in the file. That's a pity....

Can't say I particularly agree with that Michael. I've never been a lover of OLE. It's to cumbersome & can lead to unwanted errors.

I do agree about the svg exports though, Xara needs to beef up it's svg exports.

[Forumarian]

Can't say I particularly agree with that Michael. I've never been a lover of OLE. It's to cumbersome & can lead to unwanted errors.

I do agree about the svg exports though, Xara needs to beef up it's svg exports.

My version of Xara Photo and Graphic Designer 2013 has svg export but I still couldn't import into Inkscape.

I used to use inkscape for all my vector graphics needs. The link issue was the only reason I bought Xara, I remember reinstalling windows or linux and with inkscape my images would be all missing because of absolute links and it became an issue, at the time I think Inkscape was crashing when I embedded images.

I may well go back to Inkscape using the relative method which will fix all the problems, I just have to remember to change the path for every image at the time I import it since I beleive there is no setting to make it always use relative paths?

I also like how with Inkscape you can make a page 100 metres wide if you want, in Xara using the scaling feature on a paper or poster sized page means you have to do some calculations before using the optimising feature.

But it is good to hear it doesn't reoptimise.

[handrawn]

depends egg

if say you had a folder which contains a xar file and all your linked bitmaps, then you could have just the one xar file without the damn thing crashing because it's trying to use too much memory which is one of xara's great failings - and you have just the one discrete unit: the folder

linking to files all over the place on the other hand is a bit 'herding-cats' true enough

the svg export from xara designer does not include things like stroke shapes and certain transparencies, but you could argue these are not in the SVG spec depends how you want to look at it maybe

[Egg Bramhill]

Yes, herding cats is correct. I prefer to keep my originals in a folder named "Original Images" and optimise the images in Xara. Best of both worlds. I rarely have a out of memory calls from Xara.

I have big problems import Xara created svg's into Inkscape, they always have large borders around the shapes. I have to open the Xara generated svg's in notepad and delete all the <defs> to get them import at the correct size. Bitmaps just don't export into Inkscape.

[Forumarian]

Does anyone know if it is possible to configure Inkscape to automatically use the settings linked and relative paths for every image imported.

I often need to import lots of images at once 20+ (which I drag in from the file browser) and over and over again it asks do I want to link or embed and then I have to manually change the path in image properties which is a bit time consuming but still ok.

But then I often have to copy the image 20+ times in Inkscape and if I forgot to change the path to relative it's a nightmare to change them all. I like to recrop or stretch some images though so I can't just create clones.

Probably I should post in the Inkscape forums, but does anyone know a quick solution to set an import option that is applied to all imported images?


In Xara it just embeds and rarely crashes, but since I can't set my page to a real world size (eg. 20m wide) and have to use scaling in page options (I use metric) and then the optimise dialog only shows pixels per inch and all this makes it very complicated to work out. I worked it all out before but I forgot to write it down and I'll have to do it all again. Then I was worried about it reoptimising the images again if I didn't get the ppi the same.