Images loading slowly

[Silverado05]

I kind of an a annoyance and if it is loading slowly on my cable connection I feel for those that are on Dial-Up and DSL. Could someone tell me reason why they would load slowly? I would post a link for an example but I have the site shut down right now for a couple of days because I am having problem with people. I will post it in a few days so you can see but would like some ideas of what might be causing this.

[redsox9]

What are the size of your images? Not being sure what purpose they serve, you may want to consider using lower-resolution images.

[Silverado05]

Ok the size is pretty big I guess.... 1365.35 KB. What can I do to compress that if that is the reason which I am pretty sure it is after looking around at the image size of other sites. Are their any compression tools out there?

-Thanks

[abssorb]

Pretty big? More like incredibly huge. Aim to get them below 100Kb :)
:)
Try GIMP for resizing and all image manipulation:
http://www.gimp.org/

[Early Out]

Microsoft offers a nice little free image resizer, available here (http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe). Once you've installed it, if you right-click on an image file in Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer), it shows up as a "Resize Pictures" option (you can choose multiple files). There are some preset sizes, and if you click Advanced, you can use custom sizes, overwrite the original, etc. Resizing to something like 1024x768 will not only make the image smaller, it will reduce the file size to something much more reasonable (like in the 100KB range).

Viewed on a computer monitor, the images won't lose any clarity at all - you'd only see the difference if you tried to enlarge one of those images.

[BOG]

That's really big.

[felgall]

There is also an online tool at http://www.netmechanic.com/products/GIFbot_FreeSample.shtml which can be used to strip unneeded colours from gif files and adjust the compression used on jpeg files (and convert between the two formats). The tool shows you your image with a variety of different levels of compression so that you can select the one that gives the best compression without any significant loss of quality. A full screen image should be able to be reduced to about 50k or less in size and still look quite acceptable.

Using images of too high a resolution makes it easier for would be image thieves to remove embedded watermarks.

[Silverado05]

Microsoft offers a nice little free image resizer, available here (http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe). Once you've installed it, if you right-click on an image file in Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer), it shows up as a "Resize Pictures" option (you can choose multiple files). There are some preset sizes, and if you click Advanced, you can use custom sizes, overwrite the original, etc. Resizing to something like 1024x768 will not only make the image smaller, it will reduce the file size to something much more reasonable (like in the 100KB range).

Viewed on a computer monitor, the images won't lose any clarity at all - you'd only see the difference if you tried to enlarge one of those images.


Thanks that helped a lot. I was able to get them all under 100 Kb without losing any resolution. With the exception on one which is 124 Kb. Not sure why I couldn't get it under 100 Kb but it's definitely better then 800 Kb.

So now that I got all my pictures and thumbnails under control I have a bigger problem to tackle now. My background for my site and my header image is really big also. How can I get the size of those down without losing resolution and the width and height I need for them?

-Thanks

[Early Out]

What kind of files are those background images? Is there any reason why you can't resize them the same way?

[Silverado05]

They are png files made in Fireworks but I can same them into any format.

They thing about it is if I save it as 800x600 which is the smallest with power toys without going to advanced size then change the size via width height tags. I don't want it to look distorted, see what I mean?

[Early Out]

Yeah, letting the browser enlarge an image ends up looking like crap. Not sure how to handle that one - maybe someone else will have some bright ideas! :)

[Silverado05]

Well it was 882 Kb and using power toys with the advance size I was able to cut down the size in half to 426 Kb. That is still rather big you think? What is a good avg size for images 760x237 and a long those lines?

[felgall]

A good size for a 760 x 237 image would be around 45k. That's about the biggest any of my images have ended up once I finish optimising them for the web. Most of the 600x400 images I have are under 15k and they would take up more screen space than your image.

[Silverado05]

A good size for a 760 x 237 image would be around 45k. That's about the biggest any of my images have ended up once I finish optimising them for the web. Most of the 600x400 images I have are under 15k and they would take up more screen space than your image.

Ok so how and what to you do to optimize and compress them for the web and keep the resolution? I am using Fireworks to create the images.

[Silverado05]

Ok I got my 760 x 237 header image down to 44.58 Kb but I think it looks like crap compared to the other. The text looks kind of blurry and flat.

What do you think?

http://www.mesquitechristmas.com/index.html