How to handle large image?

[cstricklen]

On a real estate site, I need to include floorplans of rental properties. I've made jpegs of the drawings and styled them in divs to match the rest of the site and they seem to work fine, but they are big (70-90kb).

I have noticed such images on a lot of sites are PDFs;these seem to be even larger. What is the advantage, if any.

Also, would it be better to have these pages open in a separate window?

[Car_Guy]

A .gif image will show your floor plan drawings more clearly, without the smearing along the edges of lines that is an inherent limitation of .jpg images. With GIFs you'll be limited to 256 colors, but that shouldn't be an issue.

A smaller version of the floor plan, about half-size, could be a link to the larger version.

PDF files are annoying. They seem to be popular with people who find them easier to create than Web pages. We shouldn't have to download a file and open it in another application just to see a picture.

[cstricklen]

Thanks for your response. Exactly what I was thinking about the PDF.

With the graphics themselves I have no problem, having been a professional graphic artist for 15 years, I can make about anything look good. Being new at web design, I was just curious about how most people handle the large images. I don't know why you should have smeared or jagged edges on proper jpegs (with line drawings, etc., you need to use grayscale--not black and white).

However, because size is suddenly a consideration (not a problem at all when designing for other media), I tried an RGB gif. It looks almost as good as the grayscale jpeg and it's half the size. Thanks.

[tedster]

If the floor plans appear to be black and white to the human eye, then most of the time you can use a gif with only 8 colors in the color look-up table. This approach often gives the smallest file size, by far, and it will not show the compression artifacts of a heavily compressed jpg.

Use Photoshop's "Save for the Web" (ImageReady) to compare gif and jpg appraoches, and those algorithms usually do the best job.

[cstricklen]

Thanks. These don't look precisely black and white, so the 16-color one looks quite a lot better, and is still quite small. The client gave me a mishmash of drawings on various types of paper, photocopied and, in some cases, wrinkled. I made lemonade by using thumbtack graphics to "tack" the floorplans onto a background that looks like corkboard.

[tedster]

background that looks like corkboard

That can mean a lot of extra file-size, especially in a gif. But if you are happy with the visual results and the file size, sounds like you're good to go.