Images are an important design element of your website. Unlike many web building kits, page4 has an image manager that you can access directly in the main menu under "Images". All images that are uploaded from your computer to your website are stored in page4's image manager. There are a few things you should keep in mind.
File and image size
The maximum size of an image must not be larger than 2 megabytes (MB), i.e. 2,048 kilobytes. At first glance, this doesn't sound like much and gives the impression that we are limiting you. Fortunately, it is not. Other systems allow you to upload larger images, but modify the image file after uploading and reduce the file size and what is worse, the dimensions of the image. For example, one competitor allows images in the file size of 5 MB, but reduces the image dimensions to 1,820 x 1,000 pixels for images you use as content and 2,048 x 1,536 pixels for background images. We ourselves provide our users with background images in the size 2,560 x 1,440 and most of the images have a file size of 200 to 500 kilobytes, none is larger than 1 MB. The probability that you will need such large images (in terms of dimensions) on your website is zero. The largest images are needed for a gallery. If you have a screen of 1,920 x 1080 px and run your gallery in fullscreen mode, the images will be displayed at a maximum height of 1,000 px. So a 2,560 x 1,440 px image you uploaded would only be displayed in the gallery at 1,778 x 1,000 px. Not because we limit that, but because the technical environment makes a larger display impossible. So it wouldn't do any good at all to upload larger images. Besides, your website needs time to display large files. The more images you have on a page, the more important it is that these images are optimized for the web. This means nothing other than trying to keep the file size as small as possible. Here are a few numbers. If your visitor surfs with an internet connection of 6 MBit (DSL 6.000), it takes 2 seconds to load a 2 MB image from the internet to your computer. It also takes a similar amount of time to display the image in the browser at all, because when the visitor calls up your website in his browser, all the data needed to display the website must be loaded into the browser from our server via your visitor's Internet connection to his computer. The more data this is, the longer the visitor has to wait before he can use your website. The files we use are optimized, compressed and loaded in such a way that the visitor can act as quickly as possible. So can call pages and scroll on your site. If we would use all images that you have uploaded and installed on your page as originals and your images would be on average really 2 MB in size, then the visitor of your website would be long gone before your page is completely loaded. Even 5 images on your homepage would make people wait more than 10 seconds and nobody does that. Waiting too long before a web page is displayed is the main reason why visitors leave. That's why we make sure your images are optimized.
Image optimization through page4
Let's say you have uploaded an image in the size 2.560 x 1.440 and the image has a file size of 500 KB. You create an image content element on a page, link to the image in question, reduce the image size to 300 x 169 px and save the content. As soon as the page is called up for the first time, page4 checks whether a so-called cache image is available in the size. If not, the original is called up by a program on our server, reduced to the size of 300 x 169 px and saved with a special marker in a special folder in such a way that the file size is as small as possible without reducing the quality of the image. The new image, optimized to the exact size, now has a file size of about 45 KB, less than 10% of the original. Every time your web page is accessed, page4 will use this small, optimized image to render your web page and make it load 10 times faster than when the original is used, without your visitor noticing any difference in quality. Tip: If you want to have control over the quality and display of your images, you should upload each image in the exact image sizes (in pixels) that you need. If page4 detects that you are using the original size, it will not create a cached image, but will of course use the exact image you uploaded.
Image formats
All images you want to use must be saved as RGB images. RGB is the way colors are represented. Normally this is the standard for digital image files. If you buy images that are also suitable for print media, it may be that these images are created in CMYK color space. Such images must be urgently converted to RGB color space. The file format of the images can be png, gif or jpg or jpeg. Formats like tiff, BMP, psd, pcx or others are not supported. If you use the png or gif format and the image contains transparent areas, then it is mandatory that you use only the original size. As soon as you resize the image in a content element, a cache image is saved and the image is converted to jpg format, losing the transparency. If you use an animated gif on your page, the same applies. Any resizing will ensure that the original is no longer used for display, and special properties will be lost if they are tied to the file format.
Image alignment
Currently it is not possible to rotate images in page4. So you should make sure that each image is uploaded in exactly the orientation you need it. The thumbnails in the image manager will display the image in the exact orientation in which you uploaded it. If you use an image on your page, it will of course be displayed in the same way as in the administration. If an image is displayed upside down or lying down in the management, although it is a portrait format or vice versa (i.e. rotated by 90 degrees), then the only option is to delete the image from the management and upload it again. Of course, you will need to use an image editor on your computer to rotate the image in question before uploading it again.
Choosing the right name for your images
You cannot change the image names in Page4. You should therefore make sure to use descriptive names so that you can recognize your images by their names. Only unique names are allowed. This means that if an image is uploaded with a name that is already used by another image, Page4 will append a number to the name of the new image along with a hyphen. This is regardless of whether the file extension is different. For example, if you have uploaded an image with the name september2014.jpg and you upload a second image with the name september2014.png, page4 will make it september2014-1.png. Please keep the following rules in mind when naming your images: 1) No word spaces, no special characters. Word spaces are automatically replaced by a hyphen. Special characters like ä,ö,ü and ß converted to ae,oe,ue and ss. Percent sign (%), dollar ($), paragraph (§) and other characters are simply deleted. 2) The image name can contain max. 30 characters. If you used special characters like an ä, page4 makes 2 characters out of it, so special characters count double. If the name is longer than 30 characters, page4 deletes all other characters and appends a hyphen and a number to the name. This is a safety measure to avoid duplicate names caused by the shortening. You should therefore be careful to make sure that especially the first letters of the name are meaningful. Let's say you have a series of images and all the names start with "summer-holiday-at-the-maldives-2015-and-now-what-is-in-the-picture". Then page4 shortens all image names to "summer-holiday-at-the-maldives" (30 characters) and then simply appends a hyphen and a consecutive number. And already you can't tell from the name what the picture is about. Fortunately, both the image manager and the image selector have an image preview. Nevertheless, it is helpful to make sure before uploading that you can tell the images apart by their names.
Data backup
Our web construction kit page4 is a tool so that you can create your own website and present content (texts, images, etc.) that you have created. For this content we reserve a certain space on our servers, depending on which version you use. By now, many people are used to storing all their data in a cloud. You no longer have your pictures locally on your computer but in the cloud and then you can access them from anywhere in the world. page4 is not a cloud service. We make daily backups of our customers' data and are therefore able to reset websites to a previous state, which means that all changes since that state will be lost. However, you should not assume that our servers will serve as a cloud for your images. Everything you have uploaded to your website should be kept on your computer and backed up. page4 is not meant to be a backup for your image collection. Make sure that you have a backup of all the data you use for your website on your computer or hard drive. We would advise you to also keep the texts of your website as a file on your computer. It is always good to have a backup of data that is important.
Upload images
In the meantime you don't need Flash on your computer or browser to upload images comfortably. Only when uploading documents we still use Flash. The new technology requires new browsers. If you use an older browser that does not support this option, Flash will be used automatically.
If Flash is missing, an "emergency program" will be activated and a dialog will open, which on the one hand informs you that Flash is missing and on the other hand offers the possibility to upload an image at the moment. Without Flash and with an old browser there is unfortunately no other way.
With modern browsers you can now simply drag&drop image data into the image manager of your page4 site. If you create a gallery and want to upload multiple images at once, this is a very comfortable way. As a user of a free version you can upload max. 3 images at the same time. With a purchase version it is possible to upload up to 400 images at the same time. If you use an old browser and Flash, there is no limit to the number of images you can upload because the technology is different.