Storing images

[Scott Rossi]

Recently, "erik hansen"  wrote:

>> Now the inelegant solution is
>> only true if you want the images *embedded*
>> into the stacks; if you don't,
>> you can leave them on disk and reference
> them...
> 
> did anyone ever benchmark the difference btw the
> two approaches?

There's no foolproof way to benchmark this since there are several factors
that affect the speed to display an image: the size of the image/s, number
of images on the current card, the speed of the host machine, available
memory, etc.  Generally, it will take a split second or so reference an
external image, versus near-immediate display of an embedded image.  Unless
you're working with huge or heavily compressed images, you won't see any
major difference.

The benefit of referencing external files is ease of file management (you
add and remove images from an external 'images' directory at will), and
potentially lower memory requirements, if you reference the images only when
needed.  If you have 100MB worth of images, it does little good to embed all
of them into your stack since your stack will require 100+MB of memory to
run.

Regards,

Scott Rossi
Creative Director
Tactile Media, Multimedia & Design
-----
E: scott at tactilemedia.com
W: http://www.tactilemedia.com