Flash load-time

1

hey there everyone. a quick question. i am putting a lot of photos and graphics on my website, all inside flash-movies. what is the best way to keep load-time to a minimum while keeping the pictures at a decent quality? i’m using jpegs (high quality) right now - should i use a different format? or is it more about the compression rate? i’m lost.

any help much appreciated.
cheers,
anrick…

2

photoshop has a great compression tool that will let you see different qualities and settings while showing you the final file size. i would recommend using that if you can just go to File > Save for Web in Photoshop 6+

it really depends on what the images are. there is no easy algorithm to make things as small as they can be you really have to look at the colors you’re using. how important the images are to the success of the design of the site. you should also look at how the look at smaller file sizes and higher compression rates. one mistake often made by photographers i’ve worked with is they have huge scans of images and then they put them on their site really small but the file size is still huge. that’s b/c flash only compresses the original image size. anything beyond that is just scaling. all the original info is there and thus the file size.

so if you have a space that is 200x300 pixels. make your image 200x300 pixels at 72dpi (72dpi is all web browsers will render so higher dpi will not give you better quality)

it’s really a case by case basis and i’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t have too many images on a site in the first place. content is key and images are secondary and only there to help the appearance. so compress, check file sizes and quality and consider whether or not you really need that particular image and if it helps the design of the site enough to warrant it’s download time

i hope this helps

3

Some good advice from shuga.

The way I do it is I only load the images they want to see. In other words I don’t pre-load all the images that are on the site. When the user clicks a thumbnail it then calls the relevant .swf.
Here is an example of what I mean [It’s an old one].