I get the benefit of warehousing images, and I have found some warehousing stacks that look great, I want to warehouse my images… but how the hell do I warehouse an image? I can’t find a decent explanation anywhere.
Do the stacks these days, upload your images to your server and place them where they need to be? Or do I need to upload my images to my host (LittleOak) first? (I asked them and basically, they said I had to ask RW).
I have seen some discussion about uploading photos to your server and create an “Assets” folder and use an FTP app like Yummy FTP to do so. (I have never used an FTP app and am unsure how to do that, and I’m worried about placing it in the wrong place. Under HTML or PHP? I sometimes get a warning in RW that I have duplicate files - one in HTML and one in PHP and I have no idea which to delete.
I see that one copies a link to your warehouse image, and then you paste the link in the image stack from your project. I think I get that. But otherwise, as you can see I am a mess.
A couple of years ago I had to totally recreate a website when I inadvertently moved photos on my computer that were linked to my project and still fear that happening again, so I am determined to figure out this mystery called “Warehousing Images”.
If you can explain it to me in terms that I can understand, I will be ever so grateful!
I ‘warehouse’ images, PDF files, audio (mp3) files and video files (using YouTube, as that’s really ‘warehousing’ too as the files are uploaded to a host and then linked to be viewed on my websites). Although I do warehouse some of these files in my hosting space, the majority of them are on other free hosts such as Cloundinary, Google Drive and Flickr.
I save these files files to the various hosts either by using their file upload interface, or I simply FTP them to a convenient location using the Transmit FTP app. Filezilla is a free app that does all you need to upload files.
I then can find the URL of the uploaded files - this can be the time consuming bit, although it only has to be done once per file - and use these URL’s as links on my websites.
Why do I bother with warehousing when it’s easy to just drag files into the Resources area of RW and just use RW to link to them?
My warehoused resources are fairly ‘static’ and don’t tend to change when I make changes to the website. Picture galleries, PDF newsletters and journals, audio files for a ‘talking’ version of the journal. There is no point in adding these to the RW project as all this does is make the project file larger and if I need to do an ‘upload all files’ after a RW or stack update, I really don’t want to upload all those pictures/PDF’s/mp3 files again, as they haven’t changed.
My hosting accounts give me a finite amount of hosting space. If I upload all those picture/PDF/mp3 files, I soon use up that space. By using other free cloud hosting, I can put all those big files in the cloud and they don’t take up any of my hosting space.
It really does depend how your website works. If you are changing content every time you publish then you might as well just use the RW resources. If you have stuff on the site that never changes or are big files, then warehousing is the perfect solution. You don’t specifically need ‘warehousing stacks’ but many existing stacks do allow for warehousing - Joe Workman’s for instance.
I would recommend the free Cloudinary account, loads of free storage and it’s really easy to get the URL’s for stuff stored on their area.
Thanks for some good info, Gary! The websites I build don’t require much changing of images, so once I set up warehousing, I can pretty much leave it alone. Cloudinary sure does look interesting, I think I might give it a try.
Warehousing does a bunch of things. Most importantly, for say a logo that is on every page, it will load once and then never need to load it again while you browse the rest of the site. When you drag the logo (that is being used on most pages) into stacks, even a partial, the logo is exported out once per page. In this case each time you switch from page to page the logo is reloaded, slowing down your page.
Pro tip: control your warehouse, upload it via FTP and don’t use 3rd party services. They may be cool, but if for some reason they shut down. You got lots of site images to fix.
