Layout is done, but pictures take forever

[virgofashions]

Hi there Thankyou again for all your help.
If you take a look at,
http://www.virgofashions.com/acatal...ments-TOPS.html. You can see that the layout is all done, except for the added sections like, new in,bestsellers,special offers, they all appear in the old style of all coming underneath each other.
The pictures take forever to do, There must be a quicker way to do this. My picture process is as follows: 1.)Edit pictures in photoshop and save under, s_departments-tops-plain_crinkle_vest(for example) in the preview html folder. But for some reason photoshop only allows me to save the first 15 or so letters, so I have to rename all the pictures properly in preview html. I then run norcat and then import into actinic. I then have to assign each picture to its product in actinic. That means I have to do this twice because i have two sections, departments and designers.Once I have done this once and the picture's name is exactly what the description is it stays on that product even after running norcat again and again and importing the data into actinic. I would love to find out how other people do their's.
Is there not a way where I can use the six digit code like I do for my products. ie for the thumbnail product pic to be,t_departments_tops-004380 or something, the section thumbnails are easy to do ie s_departments-tops.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is such a lengthy job.

[gillian]

My method for adding pictures.

I hope this is helpful.

I edit my pictures in Photoshop.

I give my large pictures the product code for the item (this is the picture used for the extended information window).

I give the image that will appear in the catalog the same name but with an s at the end (the s stands for small incase you are wondering!).

e.g. Product code is 343434
I use Photoshop to create 343434.jpg and 343434s.jpg

I use 'Save for Web' in Photoshop and save all my images in the 'Site1' folder.

I realise that the product code is not as meaningful without the text at the beginning, but I just added my products a section at a time and it wasn't too time consuming.

The pictures are then available for the preview and are easily uploaded to the server.

Why do you assign the pictures twice? Don't you use duplicate products?

[virgofashions]

Thanks for the reply.

Hi there, Thanks for the reply, when you save the pitures with an s at the end do you have to assign them after or does norcat assign the pictures to the product automaticly? I save my product pictures to the folder previewhtml and under the top2toe six digit reference code ie 004380 and for the enlarged picture 004380-p. I wonder id I added an s to the end if it would assign properly. Still a bit unsure of the whole thing but hopefully a bit more knowledge will get me by. Any ideas or experiences with this? I have to assign the pictures twice because the website is split in two, 1st by departments then by designers. Is there a definate way of norcat automaticly assigning the product thumbnail for me by what I save it as?

[wjcampbe]

You might get a quicker answer on the NorCat questions over at http://www.drillpine.biz/forums/

[DaveT]

By saving images with the name of the code you can also do bulk Access updates to enter the name of the image into a string to go into the image field:

If you create a new update query on a BACKUP copy of your ActinicCatalog.mdb, you can run a query like:

UPDATE Product SET [Image Filename] = [Product]![Product Reference] & "s.jpg"

This will update all the small images to for example "12345s.jpg" where 122345 is the ref. You need to have set up all the products first. Likewise to do the larger images:

UPDATE Product SET [sExtendedInfoImage] = [Product]![Product Reference] & ".jpg"

Try on a backed up copy of the dbase first and make a safe snapshot.

[RuralWeb]

I use a simlar method to Gillian except that I use Image Ready which is Part of Photoshop to resize and optomise the images prior to saving them direct to the site folder as a large pop up and a small product image.

[jont]

The main delay I found was the flash image on the homepagen which seemed to load long after the rest of the page had appeared.

I did notice some of the product images were over 100kb - especially where you had three views of the same item - which is quite a large size but thankfully only 1 product per page. You could break these larger images down into their 3 parts and load them in using a customvar into the product template.

[NormanRouxel]

Many product images are 5 times bigger than they need to be.

For example on http://www.virgofashions.com/acatalo...ue-New_In.html the first item 004895.jpg is 104Kb and only 22Kb when re-saved using Paint Shop Pro and a compression factor of 25. The two images are nearly visually indistinguishable.

Likewise with your Section images. E.g. s_Departments-DRESSES-beaded_twist_strap_crinkle_dress.jpg is 13Kb and only 4Kb when resaved as above.

[RuralWeb]

There are 30 product images on this page each with sizes between 30 and 100K I would suggest that this is well in excess of an ideal page size that would download quickly. I work on a page size of 85k total which ensures that the page downloads quickly. It would be better if you gave each product its own page.

[virgofashions]

Thankyou for the replys.

Hello there, Thankyou for all of your replies. The reason for large picture sizes is due to the quality of the image. The picture is the main thing that people are looking at to judge the product and I need that to be the best it can be. If I make the image less quality then the file size will go down but then the product suffers. Its very tricky and I believe its the best I can do it as without losing quality and losing sales.

In reply to everyones thumbnail methods, I don't quite understand what people are saying. If I save a thumbnail picture as 004380s, will that automaticly be picked up by norcat and put onto actinic without me assigning each one?

[virgofashions]

Also

also how do I change the black writing underneath the thumbnail pictures to be smaller and dark grey instead? I have tried to change it in actinic colours but that writing in the middle stays the same. Also how do I remove the normenu at the top and bottom of each page, ie: VirgoFashions.com > Departments > DRESSES . Any ideas?

[Bruce]

Hi,

What they meant I guess was that if you named your images and placed them in the Site1 folder, then you will not have to do the same in the preview folder. You will however have to assign the images within Actinic.

To be able to change the color of the font for the section Link you will have to edit the template. Go to Design | Options | Layouts .. 'Section Link Templates' click 'Edit' and look for NETQUOTEVAR:SECTIONNAME, you will have to insert font tags around this bit to display the color you require. Save, exit and update the site to see the changes.

Kind regards,