Hi all,

I have a question regarding images and site speed. What I am wondering about is this. Would it be better to keep my web site images in their "images" folder and link to them from the root of my domain. Or, would it be better/faster if I store them on a seperate hosting provider and link to them there. Any input is appreciated.
Thanks,

Norseman

Leave your images local to your site. Sticking them on a 3rd party host would cause additional calls outside your site and slow things down somewhat.

Thank you LadynRed, will do.

And you did not ask but you can save a ton of bandwidth and greatly increase your speed by compressing those images.

Web quality photos need nowhere near the resolution that print images need. A 96kb file can shrink to as little as 14KB and look just fine.

I will also add, clicking on an image to go somewhere else can be agitating to the visitor, but at times it's used appropriately.

storing at your own domain is i think better than somewhere else. try lowering down the resolution and optimize the images for faster downloading.

Colbyt, When you say compress photos....do you mean make them smaller? Like if I take a 1600x1200 size photo and turn it into a 640x480? I set my photobucket command to do that automatically when I upload photos to them. I also have a program called Ken Ward's Makeup that will do it on my computer...really neat FREE program I've used for years.

So anyway, are you talking about just reducing the size or something else?
Thanks -Chip

Like if I take a 1600x1200 size photo and turn it into a 640x480?

Nope, that's just "squashing" the image.

What you should be doing is scaling the image to new dimensions and reducing the DPI. You can also add compression for website images, applying 30 to 50% compression to a high quality original leaves them good enough for web use.

Yeh thats what everyone first thinks of doing you dont want to scale the dimensions of the images (the dimension size or "aspect ratio") you want to reduce the images "file size" or "disc size" so if it was a 500kb file you could reduce that to say 200kb and not really loose any image quality with compression.

You can adjust those settings in most image editing tools like photoshop.

Chrishirst and Mofodog,
I gotta tell ya, what you're saying makes a lot of sense....only thing is I've had a website for 3 1/5 years and no one told me about this till now....I must have about 20,000 photos on my site and they're all uncompressed I guess. I have frontpage 2000....You would think with all the photo editing options they're would be one to "scale to new dimensions" and "compress" photos..but I don't see either...it seems so basic....I do see something interesting though in the picture properties box....under the general tab...for Jpegs I see adjustable numbers for "Quailty" and something called "progressive passes"....the default seems to be set to 75 for Quality and 0 for progressive passes.
-Chip

Use CSS Sprites for common images.

eugen, What are CSS Sprites and common images and how do I get them?...especially curious what a common image is?? Do they look as good a regular photo? -Chip

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites/

What eugen means by common images are one that are used on every page such as navigation elements etc. But of course it doesn't help in the slightest with your original question.

What you posted about FP2k is image compression, but you should still create thumbnails in a graphics program rather than FP.