posted on September 15, 2005 06:10:55 AM new
Greetings, from a hard-coding Spare Dollar refugee. I have a few questions regarding Vendio "standard" images and "supersizing.
Is there any formula or rule of thumb that I can use to figure out what size the reduced standard image on the main listing will be, given the size of the original?
Do you recommend any sizes for the original image which seem to work better than others when reduced, e.g. 640x480, 400x300,etc.?
Do you have any suggested parameters for my uploaded images? Up until now I have been using mostly 640x480 jpg's, at 96 d.p.i. and 25% compression.
Also, do your full-size images download into memory when the customer opens the main listing, thence to be resized by the HTML, or does it actually download a separate, smaller image?
posted on September 15, 2005 11:45:33 AM new
Hello,
Images will be eligible for automatic resizing when they are more than 250 pixels wide. Height does not factor into this so the best formulas are ones that are wider than they are taller. So, if you had an image that was 640 width and 480 height, it would resize itself nicely.
When a customer opens your listing and clicks on the clickable image, they are taken to a page with the full sized image. The images don't download or anything.
posted on September 15, 2005 05:59:05 PM new
Thanks for the reply and info, Sonya. That will help.
Regarding the downloading, I didn't phrase my question very well. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, but for the benefit of anyone reading this thread who might not, let me try again.
On Spare Dollar (and most other eBay services, I think) if you have, say, a 640x480 image, the entire image loads into the customer's RAM as the page is loading. The HTML of the page then tells their computer to display a resized clickable image or "thumbnail" of the full-size one on the listing. When you click on that image, it opens a new page which calls up and displays the full-size 640x480 image which is already in memory.
Since the whole image has to load into RAM (or VRAM) when the main listing is opened, their thumbnail option does not save any loading time over just displaying the full-size image. It just saves space. Of course, it *does* shorten the wait between clicking on the thumbnail (assuming the customer does)and displaying the full-size image, since the image is already in memory.
Once in a while, you run into a service with a clickable thumbnail set-up where there is actually a separate thumbnail image-file for every full-size image, and they are stored on the image-hosting site. Only the small thumbnail loads when the listing is viewed, saving a certain amount of time, depending on how many images, how big, etc. When the customer clicks on the image, it links to the full size image on the hosting server. At that point it takes a hair longer, but the theory is that you want your main listing to open as quickly as possible before the customer gets antsy and moves on.
Because I can't access the code to your templates, I don't know which system Vendio uses. This is hair-splitting, I realize. It would never sway my choice of eBay listing services, but it might enter into decisions regarding what size of image I might use in a given circumstance.
The Pony is getting long-winded - sorry. When you have time, I'd be interested in learning which method Vendio uses.
posted on September 16, 2005 09:43:13 AM new
Hello,
I think I understand what you mean now -- you want to know if when images load on Vendio, and you have image resize turned on, if it's actually the full sized image loading but in a scaled down version -- am I right? If I am, then the answer is no -- there's an actual thumbnail that loads so it decreases the loading time. When you click the thumbnail, you get taken to the original version that you uploaded.
posted on September 16, 2005 09:54:32 AM new
Yep, you hit the nail right on the head. So Vendio actual has two image files (a full-size and a thumbnail) for each image a person uploads. Very good. I think that's the better of the two ways to do it.
Thanks very much for the information. I certainly appreciate it.
