Flatten photo group

[gcellison]

Thanks very much for your advice, gwpriester.

Sometimes I decide to change an image after my first design. It usually doesn't entail enhancements, but more likely resizing or changing the cropping. It appears that flattening photo groups is a destructive process.

I believe I will keep the modified images in separate .xar files and paste the flattened images into the website project. That way I will still have access if I want to change things later.

Thanks again,
Greg

[gwpriester]

That's a very good idea.

[Egg Bramhill]

So, my question for anyone who has used or considered using the flatten photo group tool: what is your advice? Is it better to leave the photo group in the project (for example, in case of later modifications) or do you prefer to lighten the project by flattening the groups? And of course, what is behind that preference?

Greg, my general choice on this matter would not be to optomize images. I would only do so if my xar/web file became slow & cumbersome to load. {Perhaps time to split your site into subsites?}. Optomise(Flatten?) is destructive. When you publish your website the image is optimised for browser display, but the image remains large-format, clipped, filtered etc. within Xara for future amendment.

[gcellison]

Thanks, Egg. I agree. I've never optimized in the past until I was ready to export the final version for upload to the hosting server. Even then, I kept the pre-optimized project file separate in case of later modifications. Now that I understand more accurately that the "flatten photo group" is essentially optimization, i.e., destructive, I will keep the permanent version of my modified images pre-optimized.