Optimum image sizes

[Esinem]

Please excuse the daft questions but I'm not hugely techie and fairly new to this type of thing.

I'm setting up a large number of galleries with sub-sections, e.g. shows>show 1, show 2 etc, but my original images are mixed in size from a few hundred kb to 10Mb. The default image sizes in Phoca seem OK, so I was wondering:

a) How big should my uploaded files be given that I'm reluctant to upload the full-size files, since it is slow, uses lots of space and probably entirely pointless?
b) What's the most painless way to re-size my files?
c) Is it faster to let Phoca create thumbs or is it better to make it a by product of b), e.g. by using Photoshop Web Gallery wizard, then FTP-ing the images + thumbs?

Any easy to understand help would be gratefully received.

[caro84g]

Hi,

a) I always upload them the same size as the large image (if it's smaller then you get smaller 'large' thumbnails)
b) you mean on your home computer. For windows and personal use you can use IrfanView which has a batch conversion tool (resizing and renaming), or Google Picasa, where you can export images to another folder, with different sizes.
c) I've never tested it to create thumbs myself and then ftp them to the server, but I think that's way slower than phoca creating the thumbs.

Regards, Carolien

[Esinem]

a) Umm, obvious, when you come to mention it
b) Yep. Not used either but it sounds like I'll be OK with Fireworks or P/shop to do the same job
c) OK, looks like I might have misunderstood

Many thanks, Carolien. I think I've got the basics.

Hopefully, I'll be brave enough to explore some of the massive number of options now...

[caro84g]

Hopefully, I'll be brave enough to explore some of the massive number of options now...

Yeah... there used to be less options (and less features... )

Here they're all explained: https://www.phoca.cz/documents/2-phoca-g ... -menu-item

Regards, Carolien

[Esinem]

Thanks, I'll go take a look.

I suppose having the full-size images on the server allows you the flexibility to change any of the thumbnail/image sizes but at the expense of server space (but it's cheap as chips). If I were to add to the Wish List, it would be for Phoca to automatically resize the main images as part of the upload (preferaly locally but I guess on the server would be OK with an option to automatically delete the full-size images).

[caro84g]

Hi,

there is a feedback button on the right of the screen. there you can post your feature request or vote for other people's feature requests

Regards, Carolien

[wizardchef]

I was about to post a question as to whether or not there is an administrative parameter that the admin could set that would limit the maximum height/width on upload. Apparently, it is not there. This is a significant problem. Here's why.

I am using about a dozen computer-illiterate people to maintain my Joomla! site. They have no idea how to use an image resizing program on their client computer. The problem comes in the following way. i want them to be able to use the Phoca gallery images in their articles. I am using the JCE editor, which allows resizing, but it is resizing of the image on the fly, and does not resize the underlying image. So far, so good. But, if the gallery image is huge in size, it takes forever to render in the article page, even though it appears to be small.

I need to lock the maximum image size on the site down to, say, 640 pixels in each dimension, so it will still look nice in the gallery, but when the image is used and re-sized in an article it won't take forever to render.

I strongly vote for an max-image-size-limit-on-upload feature in the next version of Phoca.

[Jan]

Hi, as users can upload images different ways:

java
flash
standard
ftp
media manager
other web file manager.

there is a difficult way to check original images on the server. Phoca Gallery doesn't use original images (if this is not set in some methods), only large thumbnails are displayed as large images. If you will use Phoca Gallery Plugin, the images are thumbnails too. In article there is not used original image.

But in every case, this feature was added into a feature request list.

Jan