Optimizing images

One of the goals with Photographos series is to simplify the process of creating beautiful image galleries on the web. 

Most of the times it ”just works” with almost any images. However, there are some things you can do to make the Photographos slideshow run even smoother, especially when deploying:

Use reasonably sized images

The biggest performance lag comes from using really large images and letting Photographos 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. 

A good standard to start with is 600 x 600 pixels using 70 as quality.

Other standard sizes for landscape images would be: 

• 1024 x 768 pixels
• 1280 x 960 pixels

Compress your images

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

Don't add too many images at once

There are no limits to how many images you can add, but after 30 it can clog the pipes on load, especially in slower browsers like Internet Explorer. 

Use a reasonable amount of images at first, then try the check/uncheck method on Rapidweaver Album to remove or add images on the fly.

Photo Album plugin settings

The standard Rapidweaver Photo Album plugin applies further compression to images, on top of Photographos compression settings. 

To further improve image quality in Photographos go to Photo Album page inspector > Image Settings > Best.

Last, uncheck the 'Scale Images' option, as shown in this screenshot: