My images are using too much bandwidth, only problem is I haven't got a clue how to reduce the bandwidth.
Does anyone have a step by step instructions??
I also need to reduce the bandwidth my header is using? anyone know how?

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Fairtrade Clothes
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

would uploading image handler 2 do any good? or will that just cause more complications as site is fairly established now

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Fairtrade Clothes
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

Image Handler 2, isn't what you need. What you need are smaller image file sizes. Make the images for your thumbnails the same physical size as the displayed thumbnails and play with the JPG quality settings or consider changing some of them to gifs to get the maximum reduction in file size.

Get yourself the best graphics software that you can get your hands on then google "image optimisation" with the name of the S/W in the search string too. This should provide you with a few sites outlining how to do it with your chosen software.

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Lawrence

ok, I can't get my head round this one. I can optimise the images but how do I add more than one image ? ie a small one and large one?? At the moment they are all in my main images bit, they aren't allocated to any specific category so does this need to change then? Do I need to upload more than one size image then but just change name slightly? and how does zen know which one to show? I tried following the tutorial from zen but to be honest it confused me even more.It keeps going on about dvd category???? And why have I got a dvd categopry with images of dvds in their too?
I am CRACKING up!!

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Fairtrade Clothes
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

This article explains exactly how to do it http://tutorials.zen-cart.com/index.php?article=224

The image you upload via admin will be used as the thumbnail, so create an image with the same dimensions that you have defined for thumbnails in admin and use admin to upload it, then create medium and large images of the same photo and upload them using FTP, you can create sub folders for these e.g. images/med & images/large. So the result is that you have three different images e.g. image.jpg, image_MED.jpg & image_LRG.jpg. Zen will know they all belong to the same product because the all start with the same text, in this case "image". It's a very straight forward process.

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Lawrence

well why didn't you say so!!
I havce spent hours reoptimnising images.I will finish that task first.I will then experiment with the method you have jsut said. I tired it last night and it didn't work
I have that many images which are way too big though I need to optimise them all asap and then look to doing it this way.

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Fairtrade Clothes
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

Thanks for that Lawrence, I just tried it and it looks like ti worked, and it was so easy! Why didn't anyone tell me sooner lol. Looks like I will be busy again fo rthe next few days!

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Childrens Fancy Dress Costumes and Fairtrade Clothes
Childrens Costumes and Dancewear

I assumed you already knew.

I discovered it by accident when I was selling Hi Viz, I had an image of a T shirt which was called t.jpg and a picture of a pair of trousers called trousers.jpg but the trousers image was being displayed on the T-shirt product page which I thought was Zen bug at first. It's a very handy feature.

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Lawrence

Hi do you think you are better to use hosted images ie photobucket or straight from your computer?
This is what l am going to start in the next couple of days and just want opinions

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Wendy xx

www.wendysaffordableweddings.co.uk

It's better to put them on your own server. With image hosting services such as PhotoBucket they have a monthly bandwidth allowance which if you exceed you won't have any images on your site! Also you are depending on two servers to be working for your site to function correctly, if there's a problem with one of them then your store is effectively out of business for the duration of the outage, with everything in the same place you reduce the risk.

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Lawrence