Advice needed for flash gallery- What size images?

[PaulDB]

Hi all, this is my first post on these forums :-)

I just managed to set myself up a flash gallery. I'm wondering what size images most of you are using for this? I Put some on at full resolution (7.1 mp) but obviously they take too long to load. What size would you recommend?


Thanks in advance :-)

[azkul]

For the web, I keep them about 500 pixels wide. That's for 3 reasons: 1 - a large % of people still use 800x600 monitors. 2 - it fits with my design, which was built for 800x600. 3 - It keeps the site fast and limits the amount of bandwidth used.

You're welcome to take a peek, if you'd like:
The Lens Flare Photography (http://www.thelensflare.com)

[PaulDB]

Thanks for the advice. I uploaded some at 1024x768 and they look ok but are a bit slow to load (they are over 1MB).

I've had a look at your photo's, they are nice :-)

Im a bit of a photography newbie and am still learning how to use my camera but your welcome to have a look at the few random pics I uploaded. Any feedback would be appreciated.

http://www.atlb64.dsl.pipex.com/

Thanks

[azkul]

1 mb is way too big for a website. There are still a lot of modem users out there so each image will take them 5-10 minutes to download. I thought that the thumbnails were a bit too small. I couldn't see what they were until I clicked on them for the larger version (I'm using 1280x1024 res).

I'd suggest creating thunmbs about 5-6kb each, with a larger version about 50-80kb each. You might get away with slightly larger since flash will predownload them all (and it will be somewhat hard to get files 1024x768 down to 50kb without losing a lot of the quality). Maybe have 3 sizes? 1 thumbnail, 1 web version, and 1 windows background version? The windows bg version could be zipped with your url along the edge.

Just thoughts to ponder...

[blinking8s]

keep each pic below 200kb for sure...unless you know everyone viewing is on a really really fast connection.

thumbs should be as small as possible while still giving detail. Also its much better to do all this dynamically if possible.

You have to look at your target audience though, I RARELY attrack users running 800x600...maybe my grandparents. So posting an image over 700ish'px in width is ok.

generally for 800x600 websites i run a max width of 722px. for photos I compress the quality to 80% or below...hard to tell any difference in the image on a screen.

and for flash a gallery...preloaders preloaders preloaders...let them know the image is going to display soon.

[PaulDB]

Thanks a lot for all the advice guys :)

Im considering scrapping this flash viewer altogether and getting some proper hosting and using the Exhibit Engine. It looks really nice...

[tofuboy]

Everybody mentioned it already, but why not reiterate with my settings?

For large images, I set the longest dimension to 600px, and use a medium image quality jpeg compression (jpeg quality of 5-6 in Photoshop)... which usually results in images < 100k in size.

For my thumbnails, the longest dimension is 125px, and same jpeg compression as for my large files... I should probably use an even lower quality for jpeg compression on my thumbnails.

The other side to using smaller files sizes is for most hosting packages, you have a limited amount of bandwidth. 1+ meg files will make that bandwidth disappear rather fast.. if the viewers don't get tired of waiting for the images to load.