Web Studio's document files (OWS file) have been known to get very big. We saw a file that was over 250megs recently. What isn’t well known, however, is that you can slim those files down quite a bit.
The biggest culprit of large OWS files is graphics. More specifically, photographs. The growing popularity of digital cameras simplifies adding digital photos to websites. It’s so easy to take a picture and load it into WebStudio that the problems they can cause aren’t considered. The problem is the memory these pictures use on your site and in the OWS file.
A typical size for a digital photo is 1280 X 960 pixels. That requires over 39 Megabytes of storage space! The cameras typically compress the photos using JPEG compression. With JPEG compression the photo's size drops to around 90k, quite a bit of compression.
When WebStudio reads the file and saves it in the OWS file, it can't use JPEG compression because, with JPEG, the quality of the picture will degrade each time it is saved. That's one of the drawbacks of JPEG files. So it uses a format that won't degrade your photos, but is larger than JPEG when it saves photos in your OWS file.
If you have many digital photos in your site, the OWS file will grow rapidly.
What can you do to help make the OWS file smaller? You can "resample" your photos.
What is resampling? When you make a photo smaller in WebStudio, the program keeps all of the pixels (or dots) that it originally had. When it creates the graphics for the web, it removes the extra dots to make the picture smaller. However, when you save your document file, it saves all the dots, extras and all. If you resize a photo to 300 X 200 and then resample to remove the extra dots, the photo’s size drops by a factor of 20 times compared to the original! Compressed it is even smaller.
How do I resample? You simply click on the photo in WebStudio. Then find move the mouse over one of the selection handles on the corners or sides of the photo (the handles are the small black squares). You'll see its shape turns into a double-headed arrow. Leaving the mouse where it is and press and hold down the CTRL key and then click the left mouse button. Its now resampled, the quality of the photo is retained, and your OWS file will be well on its way to a slimmer, trimmer file.
http://www.webstudio.com/site/article.asp?article%5Fid=1001&Page%5FId=420
