Photo site is really slow

[gwpriester]

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

How does Gary do this Egg?

[Gary Parkin]

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.

[gwpriester]

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?

[Acorn]

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

[Gary Parkin]

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?

[gwpriester]

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.

[Gary Parkin]

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.