Inserting photos

Xway
1

In Xway, there seems to be no facility to add a photo and then scale it to the required size. In Freeway, one drew a graphics box, inserted the photo and selected Item > Graphic > Scale & Pad

Perhaps this will come in a later update, however at the moment, when inserting a photo in Xway, if it appears to be too large, subsequent scaling in Photoshop and replacing the original using Save As… has no visible effect when re-inserting it into the Xway page. When previewing, the newly-scaled pic looks fine, but because it doesn’t appear with the new dimensions in Xway, it throws the whole layout awry.
Geoff

2

Hi Geoff,

I think that Xway is failing to recognise that the graphic has been modified (in Photoshop) - and when you reimport it, it thinks that it is the same graphic and is not updating its preview.

As a workaround, try saving the modified graphic under a different name and reimport it after doing this.

Jeremy

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On 17 Dec 2019, at 17:47, Geoff Mullett email@hidden wrote:

In Xway, there seems to be no facility to add a photo and then scale it to the required size. In Freeway, one drew a graphics box, inserted the photo and selected Item > Graphic > Scale & Pad
Perhaps this will come in a later update, however at the moment, when inserting a photo in Xway, if it appears to be too large, subsequent scaling in Photoshop and replacing the original using Save As… has no visible effect when re-inserting it into the Xway page. When previewing, the newly-scaled pic looks fine, but because it doesn’t appear with the new dimensions in Xway, it throws the whole layout awry.
Geoff

3

Yes, I’m doing that. It’s no big deal, but having got so used to the flexibility of the Freeway method, the need to import images at the correct size seems a backward step.

Geoff

4

Hi Jeremy,

Will the resizing of photos/images in Xway be implemented in a future version or will all graphics have to be the size they are to appear in the browser?

Just trying to clarify this, on the site that I look after I have 22 pages of product images (1,640) that are all scaled to size in Freeway, this also keeps them all together in one place. These pages don’t appear in the final site but are used to resize the images to fit in the space on the product pages.

As Geoff says having to have all images the correct size does seem a backward step, Freeway was very flexible in the way it treated images.

Having said that, from what I have seen so far Xway is very usable and has one of the best features of Freeway in that you can see the whole structure of your site in the site panel. This makes organising a site so much easier.

I look forward to the next beta…

Steve.

5

Hi Steve,

Graphics in Xway are more similar to pass-through graphics in Freeway than they are to non-pass-through graphics. Non-pass-through graphics (graphics in grey-outlined boxes) became something of a dead end in Freeway, because they’re inflexible. If you try to give them flexible widths, Freeway displays an “invalid value” alert. Non-pass-through graphics were great for table layout, but they weren’t great for flexible layouts.

It’s likely that future versions of Xway will be able to convert non-web graphics into web graphics, and it’s possible that we could also introduce cropping and rescaling options - but those aren’t things that we’re focused on at the moment because they’re not a core part of web layout. I don’t think we will ever reintroduce the Freeway dichotomy of pass-through graphics in grey boxes (which can’t be rescaled or cropped) and non-pass-through graphics in blue or green boxes (which can, but are inflexible in other ways). Another curious feature of Freeway’s approach to graphics was that you could choose to import a graphic as a pass-through or non-pass-through graphic, but you couldn’t convert either type of graphic into the other.

Xway graphics (and Freeway pass-through graphics) can be scaled through CSS. You can set a box to scale with its parent, and the graphic will appear smaller or larger depending on what device it is viewed on. It’s generally a good idea to use graphics that are about twice as large as the size at which they will be displayed - because they will look better on high-resolution screens. Of course, the size at which a flexible graphic is displayed can vary on different devices (e.g. larger in a desktop browser and smaller on a phone). One way that HTML/CSS provides for dealing with this is to allow for different graphics to be used for different viewing sizes - we may support that in a future version of Xway.

Jeremy

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On 18 Dec 2019, at 09:52, Steve email@hidden wrote:

Hi Jeremy,

Will the resizing of photos/images in Xway be implemented in a future version or will all graphics have to be the size they are to appear in the browser?

Just trying to clarify this, on the site that I look after I have 22 pages of product images (1,640) that are all scaled to size in Freeway, this also keeps them all together in one place. These pages don’t appear in the final site but are used to resize the images to fit in the space on the product pages.

As Geoff says having to have all images the correct size does seem a backward step, Freeway was very flexible in the way it treated images.

Having said that, from what I have seen so far Xway is very usable and has one of the best features of Freeway in that you can see the whole structure of your site in the site panel. This makes organising a site so much easier.

I look forward to the next beta…

Steve.

6

Hi Jeremy,

Thanks for making clear the differences in the way Xway and Freeway handle graphics. I’m sure that as I get used to the way Xway treats graphics it will become second nature, the same as it was when I first started using Freeway all those years ago`!

I appreciate that cropping of images on the page to scale them is not what most people do but as I come from a Graphic Design/Print background it is sometimes hard to retrain your brain to work in a different way. Freeway was very similar to a print layout program and had a similar ethos and as such was easy to get up and running, especially before the responsive web came along and mixed thing up!

When I have a bit of spare time I’ll have a go at recreating the site that I design and maintain which has hundreds of images that are only served by the database to the page when needed to illustrate the product selected. It should be a good test to see what you need to do get an e-commerce site running in Xway. Wish me luck and fingers crossed!

Have a good Christmas.

Steve.

7

Hi Steve,

Thanks for your input!

Freeway developed out of a print design program - UniQorn, for anyone who remembers - and we’ve always tried to appeal to graphic designers.

We definitely want to make Xway as easy as possible for people with a graphic design background.

Jeremy