Posting pictures online

[LisaNewton]

I know DPS is loaded with experts, and I need some help and advice.

I have a website, Travelin' Local, I used to blog and post pictures, but my site runs faily slowly. I'd like to speed it up.

What is the best and most economic way to download photos to the web?

Thank you,

[OsmosisStudios]

I had no problems with the wait time. Of course, Im not a broadband connection, though it is being streamed through the campus wi-fi.

If you want to optimize it, switch from .PNG to .JPG for your images: that'll likely cut into your load time considerably. You can also use Photoshops SAVE FOR WEB instead of SAVE or SAVE AS: it'll make considerably smaller files as well.

[LisaNewton]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

If you want to optimize it, switch from .PNG to .JPG for your images: that'll likely cut into your load time considerably. You can also use Photoshops SAVE FOR WEB instead of SAVE or SAVE AS: it'll make considerably smaller files as well.

Thank you for the suggestions.

PNG is slower than JPG? I was under the impression the reverse was true. I'm currently saving my pictures in the manner you suggested mostly via Illustrator, but sometimes via Photoshop.

[OsmosisStudios]

PNG slower than JPG, yes. A jpg will pretty much always be smaller. There are certain times when a PNG is unavoidable (i use them for my website layout) because of transparency or other effects.

[Wooglah]

1. Less posts on index page. Increase cutoff. If you have 10+ posts on your blog index and all those pictures loading at once... woohoo... so, set it to 10 or 15 at max.
2. Use jpeg as mentioned above, but try this - upload images to flickr or picasaweb, and then use medium size to embed them into post, do not upload images directly to blog. This way you preserve your hosting webspace, server load and you get smaller image in post (which leads to bigger one on flickr when visitor clicks on it) which increase blog load time in browser...

[OsmosisStudios]

The only problem with hotlinking an image like that is that if the image your linking to is large, then the page still loads the large image. Most browsers suck at resizing images nicely, too.

[wulf]

Try the Firefox plugin YSlow. That helps understand what is going on. In this case, I think it is because your page has a lot of information drawn from a diverse range of locations. How about simplifying what is included on the main page?

For example, each blog post has multiple images. You might want to just show the first in full, summarise the next few down to the first picture and then either drop the rest to another page or summarise them by title. That way, you reduce the amount of information that has to be loaded by someone just glancing at the site. As long as you make it easy for people to find further pages if they are interested enough to take the time to scroll down, everyone wins.

Wulf