Optimizing images

There are some things you can do to make the slideshow run even smoother, especially when deploying:

1. Use reasonably sized images

The biggest performance lag comes from using really large images and letting the slideshow script scale them down for you. This might work OK in your local environment, but it can have great effects for users with less optimized setups and slow internet connections.

Always scale down your images to a reasonable size and use jpg for compression, not png or gif. A good standard to start with is 600 x 600 pixels using 72 dpi as quality and about 100 to 200 KB in size.

Other standard sizes for landscape images would be:

• 1024 x 768 pixels
• 1280 x 960 pixels

2. Image compression

Another good procedure would be to compress your images prior to uploading. There're several image compression software available for the Mac, I use JpegMini: http://www.jpegmini.com

3. Don't add too many images at once

There are no limits to how many images you can add, but after about 20 it can clog the pipes on load, especially in slower browsers with bad Javascript support, so use a reasonable amount of images at first. 

4. Stacks' image compression

Stacks plugin apply a compression to the images, constraining to 800 pixels in width and height. This may affect the image quality, depending on it's original size.

This option can be switched off by clicking on the image and opting out for constraining at the edit panel, as shown in the image below: