Optimizing Images - Where are they stored?

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I’ve got a website with a lot of images on a lot of pages. I want to optimize them but it would be an enormous amount of work to replace each original image with an optimized version in Rapidweaver.

With a program like PNGenie I believe I can specify a folder and it will overwrite all the pictures in that folder with optimized versions. So if I can find the folder (or folders) where Rapidweaver stores the actual images used in my project, then it should be easy to optimize them.

So can anyone point me in the right direction? I can’t find the images when I “Open Package Contents” on my Rapidweaver project file, or within the Rapidweaver Application. Thanks!

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If the site is published you should be able to use an FTP program to browse the contents and find the folders that contain the photos that way.

Alternatively, export the site to a local folder and do the same thing.

Rob

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I agree with above comments… but to answer your question. Where the image is stored depends on what you use to build the page. For example, some stacks allow you to specify if you want to do “drop on the page” images or do “hosted” images where you can specify where they go. Drag and drop images will usually end up in a folder which carries the same name as the file itself. For example, with a page with the file name (url) myfile.html, you will find the image in a folder named “myfile_files” along with other “supporting” files such as page specific css etc.

Look at your server using an ftp app and this will become very clear…

It’s always best to do hosted images if you have many. It also keeps them out of your RW project file to keep the file smaller. Also, make sure you use a good file name naming convention for when you want to find images. Also be sure to use the “alt” tag for plain english descriptions of the images.

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Thanks Rob. I could do this, but the next time I export the site it would overwrite the optimized images, unless I also used these optimized images to replace the current images in the Rapidweaver file - which is the massive job I’m trying to avoid.

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Thanks Greg. All my pages are basic “styled text” pages in Rapidweaver, and all my images are “drag and drop”, so yes the project file has grown large (350mb).

I can find all my pictures in the various exported website folders, as you describe. I could optimize these, but the next time I export the site it’ll overwrite them. So I’d also need to drag and drop the optimized versions back into Rapidweaver in place of the originals, but this gets me back to the major job I want to avoid, since there would be dragging, sizing, positioning for each photo. I’ve got about 200 pages with about 5 photos on each. At 20 seconds each that’s 7 hours of work.

So I could bite the bullet and do to this, but if I could find the images within the project file itself, then I could save a lot of time because the image positioning and formatting wouldn’t be lost. Surely the images are within the project file somewhere, since mine is so massive.

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Thanks Steve. I’ll look into that stack if I can’t find an easy way to do this, and I’m putting in huge hours anyways.

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You should start with optimizing images before you put them in a RW project. Otherwise, you are complicating your own job on the creation stage and risking further complications that may arise along your way (from publishing your project to rendering of images on the web).

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Thanks Rovertek. Yes I realize that optimizing the images before inserting would be ideal. Some of these pages are 10 years old. I’m trying to fix them up.

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To answer my own question, it looks like the pictures are contained within files called data.archive inside the project file. It doesn’t look like there is an easy way to look inside these, and even if there were, each page has it’s own data.archive file, so it still wouldn’t be possible to optimize the images in large batches.

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Have a look here. Its a temporary sollution, but warehousing your images on your server is the way to go

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Dan… I do understand your situation. I inherited a 1200+ page project that was a real mess. (going back for years and years). Images were not optimized nor even sized, there was almost no meta data on pages, ton’s of broken links, etc etc. Additionally, there was a very large RW blog that I wanted to “convert” to Stacks pages (about 800 pages). The use of certain tools helped a lot. Meta Mate helped a lot (not sure if it works with RW7 as I no longer use it), as did 3rd party tools outside of RW (link checkers, etc). But I was surprised at how much you can do with something like Keyboard Maestro (macros) if you plan well, think a bit, and are careful and patient in getting them setup and working. For example, I converted the blog to stacks rather quickly (days, not months) using Keyboard Maestro. If you setup properly, position open windows precisely (SizeUp for OSX) you can do so amazing automated things.

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