Bruceee's Sandpit
Web Design with SiteSpinner
The large image here is always loaded. If you also want smaller images on this or other pages, you don't need smaller copies of the same image. Instead, you can scale down the larger image using HTML.
As there is only one image to download, and it may have earlier been downloaded for another page, your page will load faster.
To set up the base image, on your SiteSpinner work page, click on the Mona Lisa icon and select the image file to display. This is what I did for the image to the right.
This large image (18K) is always downloaded
In this way, the smaller images are all regenerated by your browser from the large image. If you use re-render, SiteSpinner will actually generate the extra images. When you publish your project, these extra images will be included as image files in your published project. Not what you want if you are trying to save bandwidth!
The next group of images are all scaled down from the larger one.
Saving Image Space by Scaling
Where you have multiple copies of the same image appearing at various places on your site at different sizes, you can arrange to download only one image (the largest) and have the browser take care of making the smaller images.
It is not a good idea to start with a small image and expand it, as your large image will lose quality -- unless that is the effect you are looking for. There is an example of this at the bottom of this page.
To show how the quality deteriorates if you expand an image, here's an expansion of my starting image. I don't recommend this for normal use.
To make a smaller version of the same image:
- Make a copy of the first image
- Drag the edges of the copy to make it smaller
- In the Quick Editor, make sure you have re-render turned off.
The only saving grace of an image like this which is scaled up from an existing image is that it is fast.
Transparent Gifs
There is one place where scaling up may potentially be quite useful. Suppose you want to make an image map with a number of links superimposed on top.
The links could all be transparent gifs, each with a different link to various pages. Each transparent gif could be scaled up from one quite small seed gif.
I have not used this technique myself yet -- but some simple tests I have done indicate that it should work. (Famous last words!)
