A question about resources in RW8

As a rule I normally “warehouse” assets (images/videos etc.) in a folder on the server and link to them from with RW, this works fine as 90% of my sites are hosted on my own servers but I am now building a site for a client who will be self-hosting, so I wish to make the project self contained.

Each page consists of three main images 150-200kbs each, these images are repeated per page twice. If I use resources in RW8 will the project use these images correctly, in that each image will only be loaded to the browser once, or does the problem with RW renaming each instance of the image across the entire site and loading each one individually still persist in RW8?

Thanks.

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It depends on how you make use of the resources. In general if you use a resource with the “Copy Macro” command of RW – then the macro will be published as a link to the single location (in the /resources directory on your published site) where the image will be published.

However, if you use this resource in another way, then you’ll have to do a bit of research on that method to make sure it works in the same way.

If you drag a resource to Stacks, for instance, it’s, well… complicated. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Normally Stacks will just publish the image using the link above, but there are a number of stacks that require cropped, scaled, or transformed images (e.g. for thumbnails and such) – in this case, Stacks will make a page-specific copy of the image for that stack’s needs, perform the crop/scale/whatever, and publish that image as well with the other page assets.

This is all very convenient and nice and transparent tot he user – which is great for novices that just want to get things published with minimal fuss and don’t know or care about warehousing or the details of having a single image source to reduce page-load times.

For those of us that need to know, absolutely with 100% confidence, that no other image sources are being created. It’s best to stick to just using Resources with the RW Resource Macro feature, or just warehousing your images.

Isaiah

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If you still think of warehousing, check out Repository Stack. This will help you and your client a lot in managing server files without the need of a FTP application. It also has a nice “copy link to clipboard” feature to grab the link to the file.

Thanks for that, but it all sounds too complex for its own good to me though. Quite why the Rapidweaver makers insist on making something so simple so difficult is beyond me.

@instacks Seems like the perfect solution, thanks.

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If you’re using stacks that support remote resources (warehoused images) just put the image inside resources and instead of pointing to a URL choose resource and select the image.
Works the same as a URL, will just use a relative address instead of a absolute address to retrieve the image. It will use the same address every time so it will only load once.

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If I don’t want RapidWeaver loading images multiple times (say from Unsplash) I just drag the image into the Resource folder and point the stack to that resource. Voila! Only one instance of the image is ever loaded.

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