optimizing my own images

**gwpriester** · 04 August 2019, 10:08 PM

Set the JPEG image quality to 95-100% and I think that will stop Xara from adding additional compression to your image.

This is assuming the image is as optimized as you want it in Photoshop.

Images are exported by default at 85 (which is actually the opposite, 15% compression), which Xara feels is a good balance of file size compression to image quality. Unless the images on your site need to be very accurate (exact fabric color, large format professional photographs etc.) even though you can see the difference in quality, it is highly doubtful your visitor, who has not seen the original image, will know the difference. Also consider the amount of time most visitors look at an image.

**Egg Bramhill** · 04 August 2019, 10:30 PM

What a strange article, written how many years ago?:

Relative to Web publishing, there really are just two common formats of images available to use: JPG and GIF (pronounced: jay-peg and giff) .

Has the author never heard of PNG's or SVG's, lossless image file formats? GIF's are fine but are limited to 256 colours so basically crap for photos. So yes import your Photoshop (+ or - 80% compressed jpg). If you must save it at 100% compression on publishing in Xara (i.e. no compression). JPG compression works by finding similar areas of colour and creating a single shape for that colour rather than individual pixels. Thus the compression. Save it again as a JPG and there's not so much to compress, it's already been done once. Save it again and again & again. Do it yourself, check out the results, the degradation is almost impossible to see.

Import a 5000px x 5000px photo into Xara. Resize it to 500px x 500px and publish it to the web. It creates a 500px x 500px JPG or PNG based on your choice in Web Properties / Images. Save the .xar file and the 5000px x 5000px remains exactly that, unless you choose to optimise it, which has no result on the published site, just the size of the xar file. I choose not to optimise photos in case I want to enlarge them latter.