Welcome to TalkGraphics.com
Results 1 to 10 of 16

Hybrid View

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jul 2017
    Posts
    15

    Default 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?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
    Location
    Placitas, New Mexico, USA
    Posts
    41,487

    Default Re: Photo site is really slow

    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.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
    Location
    Harwich, Essex, England
    Posts
    21,895

    Default Re: Photo site is really slow

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

    Intel i7 - 4790K Quad Core + 16 GB Ram + NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1660 Graphics Card + MSI Optix Mag321 Curv monitor
    + Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB SSD + 232 GB SSD + 250 GB SSD portable drive + ISP = BT + Web Hosting = TSO Host

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
    Location
    Placitas, New Mexico, USA
    Posts
    41,487

    Default Re: Photo site is really slow

    I'd recommend splitting your site into a main site with sub-sites which load your photos.
    How does Gary do this Egg?

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jul 2017
    Posts
    15

    Default Re: Photo site is really slow

    Quote Originally Posted by gwpriester View Post
    How does Gary do this Egg?
    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.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Aug 2000
    Location
    Placitas, New Mexico, USA
    Posts
    41,487

    Default Re: Photo site is really slow

    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?
    Attached Thumbnails Attached Thumbnails Click image for larger version. 

Name:	photos.jpg 
Views:	74 
Size:	69.6 KB 
ID:	119722  

 

 

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •