Photographs on websites

Everything to do with using your own website to advertise your rental property. Design, usability, hosting, getting listed on the search engines, optimising your site, pay-per-click, etc, etc.
User avatar
vrooje
Posts: 3202
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 2:48 am
Location: Burgundy, France

Post by vrooje »

Does H-R charge for replacement photos? I don't think they do.

You are quite right, though, that they do not allow links to personal property sites... which I personally don't like, but I understand their reasoning.

I believe you may be thinking of French Connections, which does charge for updates to text and pictures. That's just ridiculous, but it's apparently going to change "soon", whatever that means.
Brooke
User avatar
paolo
Posts: 3885
Joined: Thu Jun 17, 2004 1:18 pm
Location: Provence, France
Contact:

Post by paolo »

I think they dropped their charge for changing pictures actually - not 100% sure on that. The faded pictures is a mystery because even when they upload my images by hand, they look the same. They have no solution to the problem - in fact they say it looks fine to them.
Paolo
Lay My Hat
mvus
Posts: 118
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2005 8:56 am
Location: Andalucia, Spain

Post by mvus »

I've had clients upload the same photos to both owners direct uk and HR and the same pics on OD like twice as good so I assume it must be HR's compression system. I've had a few issues with OD cropping the images to make them 4.3 ratio instead the true 3.2 ratio but they have corrected the problem straight away
User avatar
Garri
Posts: 1689
Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:26 pm

Post by Garri »

pja, I was looking through the OD website the other day and did notice the photos looked good. Although I started off hating OD when I first used it I've come around to appreciating lately - it's nice a cuddly.
alexia s.
Posts: 870
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 6:38 pm
Location: Provence
Contact:

Post by alexia s. »

Regarding photo galleries, I don't know what looks best to clients but I've just received this mail from someone who has booked for next year:
"FYI, I visit your website almost daily to vicariously wander the grounds and waterfall. It gets me through a long day's teaching".
This is a lady from the States - I'm loking forward to meeting her!
Maybe we should get a state subsidy, for helping the population survive difficult times..... This does bring home the non-commercial, social work aspect of holidays.
Best,
Alexia.
User avatar
Garri
Posts: 1689
Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:26 pm

Post by Garri »

FYI, I visit your website almost daily to vicariously wander the grounds and waterfall. It gets me through a long day's teaching
Be careful, she sounds like a loony :wink:

Can you be certain that it's a 'she' and not some psychopathic mentalist with a penchant for good quality, none of that cheap sh.t, chainsaws?
alexia s.
Posts: 870
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 6:38 pm
Location: Provence
Contact:

Post by alexia s. »

I've googled her, Garri - she's a leading American academic whose e-mail corresponds to her university.

ps
Do you mean that if it's not a 'she' it's necessarily some psychopathic mentalist???
Best,
Alexia.
User avatar
vrooje
Posts: 3202
Joined: Thu Dec 09, 2004 2:48 am
Location: Burgundy, France

Post by vrooje »

What a wonderful e-mail to get, Alexia!
Brooke
richmatt
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 4:35 pm

Web Site Photos

Post by richmatt »

paolo wrote:I should add that if you put lots of large pics on a page, don't just shove them all together at the top because they may take a long time to download and lose you your visitor. If you intersperse them in the text they have something to read while the pics download.
I use 300 x 200 jpg images with 30% compression which brings down memory size to say 12KB which is important to keep download time acceptable. Then I group photos together.
Bedrooms + bathroom en-suite, livingroom + dining room. I then use Javascript to do mouseovers
I usual put four photos at the top for quickness but if you have time to spread them out in between text it does look better.
With only 4 positions it would be possible to view up to 12 images
Richard M
geoffreycoan
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2005 11:21 am
Location: Central Brittany, France
Contact:

Jpeg compression & picture layout

Post by geoffreycoan »

I use Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com) to resize and resave all my pictures from photoshop elements. I find it produces much sharper and smaller sized images than photoshop does (sometimes as much as 100% smaller).

When I designed the site I spent ages trying to decide the best layout for images as IE does such a terrible job of printing webpages and I hate printing a page with the text cropped off. I therefore went for a ribbon of 172 wide pictures down the right hand side of the page and then at least if IE does crop them off it's only the pictures that get lost and not the text.
Personally I prefer Firefox but IE still pervades too much.

Geoffrey
Les Vallees Gite, central rural Brittany - http://www.giteinbrittany.com
mvus
Posts: 118
Joined: Sun Sep 04, 2005 8:56 am
Location: Andalucia, Spain

Post by mvus »

Geoffrey, I don't see much difference between Photoshop and irfanview. Your home page pic is 46kb and most of my (near identical size as your exterior shot) pics come out at around 32 to 40 kb for exterior and a little less on interiors using 50% quality on Photoshop.
Last edited by mvus on Sun Apr 27, 2008 9:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
Alan Knighting
Posts: 4120
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 7:26 am
Location: Monflanquin, Lot-et-Garonne, France

Re: Jpeg compression & picture layout

Post by Alan Knighting »

geoffreycoan wrote:(sometimes as much as 100% smaller).
I don't believe you meant to say that. 100% smaller means it has no size at all, at least that's what it means in the English language.

If a web page doesn't print properly it's because the page was not properly designed for printing in the first place. It's not what IE is doing to it.

Alan
User avatar
Garri
Posts: 1689
Joined: Mon Jul 11, 2005 7:26 pm

Post by Garri »

If a web page doesn't print properly it's because the page was not properly designed for printing in the first place. It's not what IE is doing to it.
That's right Alan.

You can create a separate css file to control how the printing of the page looks, which is worth doing in my view. It impresses people, subtly.
geoffreycoan
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jul 12, 2005 11:21 am
Location: Central Brittany, France
Contact:

Re: Jpeg compression & picture layout

Post by geoffreycoan »

Alan Knighting wrote:
geoffreycoan wrote:(sometimes as much as 100% smaller).
I don't believe you meant to say that.
Mea culpa, I meant 50% smaller. Mind you if I could achieve 100% compression with no loss of visual quality then it'd certainly make my web pages download faster !

Alan Knighting wrote: If a web page doesn't print properly it's because the page was not properly designed for printing in the first place. It's not what IE is doing to it.
I have to disagree slightly as with just a simple page IE does a pretty awful job of printing it properly even though it displays fine on screen (say by using a 760 wide table so it'll display properly on an 800x600 screen). Even printing the page in landscape usually results in truncation (e.g. of ebay's pages).
I much prefer Firefox's facility of scaling the page to fit.

Do agree though that using a print-specific css is a neat trick and is on my list to do once I've moved my site from "tables for layout and CSS for formatting" to "CSS for everything". Currently I'm grappling with the box model problem and browser quirks vs standard mode. Argh !
Les Vallees Gite, central rural Brittany - http://www.giteinbrittany.com
User avatar
marcus
Posts: 624
Joined: Fri Jun 03, 2005 10:37 am
Location: Lot-Garonne / Dordogne borders
Contact:

Post by marcus »

Hi, If I understand correctly, I don't think these problems are signicant for you except in very particular circumstances.

Re the box model problem, I had a quick look at your site and it seems unlikely that 'pixel specific' positioning is crucial since there is a lot of space on the right already (use percentages, columns, em, float, etc) See http://glish.com/css/hacks.asp for more info.

and 'browser quirks' refers to very old browsers that pretty much no one uses any more, doesn't it?

Meanwhile to return to the original post, does anyone have any suggestions of actually how some websites maage to keep the pictures so much clearer? I use Photoshop, Image Size, then Sharpen / Unsharp Mask but the results aren't great. Could it be because my original picture is too big and it struggles to keep the accuracy when reducing the size so much? Does it make a difference if I 'sharpen' before or after reducing the size? Is there a better sequence of commands I should be using?

Cheers
Marcus
Post Reply