jpg, png, Map and Picture files sizes
 

Hello,

I have a question about map and picture sizes in Realm Works.

I'm wondering if any of you reduce the file sizes on your maps and pictures to keep your Realm Works database size down, and if so, what is a decent size that retains the quality of the map or picture?

Some of the maps I work with (Mike Schley's maps specifically) are rather large in size, some being several megabytes. I'm hesitant to use them as smart image maps.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Naleax

Absolutely

Some of mike's maps error just trying to get them in. I always save images as a *. Jpg and if it errors I reside the image in paintshop to meet the size requirements suggested by Realm Works.

I was wondering this myself. Thanks for posting!

For large maps, you may want to downsize them considerably so they load quickly and link the original as an external file. This gives the best of both worlds as you can view it at a reasonable resolution at a glance or easily navigate to the full-sized version if you want to be able to zoom in without it blurring.

Thanks for the advice.

I've gathered that jpg format is the way to go due to the greater compression while maintaining quality.

I ran a little experiment with gimp. I took a 14 megabyte png map file and exported it as a jpg file while reducing the quality in 10% increments. My goal was to see what the quality looked like at each increment. I was trying to get the 14 megabyte file under 1 megabyte while maintain a suitable quality. Based off the results I think I'll convert them to jpg and then use gimp to reduce them in size by 50%.

This works well for reference maps, but for a battle map not so much as the map starts to pixelate. Anyone have experience with Battle map images? I'd like to import battle maps for use in player view and fog of war, but this seems like it might bloat the database.

Naleax

I don't use Realm Works for battlemaps. Unfortunately I don't feel it's quite there yet as a VTT. That and I have a laptop, player visible screen and projector all hooked up. RW only supports displaying information on 2 of those screens.

I personally use MapTools. I find it much more efficient when managing the fog.

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lqs3QlNZK...%2B6szpWy4.jpg

That's a lot of diapers.

@Exmortis: You'd be shocked at how quickly nascent gamers can blow through them on a diet of pureed peas and pears. Blueberries are kinda fun the first few times.

Looks like a weekend supply from my experience. The absolute last thing you ever want is to be out at 2 AM.

Ah, they are for babies. I thought you might just be a very scary DM.

Haha - i love this community :D

But seriously... I would pay to have them removed at this stage... what's with women and having to keep every piece of baby stuff 'just in case we have another one'.

It's not like you won't have a certain amount of warning.

Word of the day: nascent

Wasn't this one already on the 5E GM Handbook page of "Words Every GM Should Know"?

It was a great little sneak-in, that page.

Hey, guys. Reviving this thread as I try to get some image files reduced in size to maybe overcome some out-of-memory issues.

I too am starting with some Mike Schley maps, huge PDF files. I have been saving to jpeg and reducing file size. Also do some cropping etc, and ultimately saving the file as 4096 x 3072 pixel jpeg. File sizes have tended to be in the 4 to 6 MB when I do this and still retain high enough quality to have readable text.

However, recently I was told to try to get these down to the 1000 x 1000 pixel range to try to fix the out of memory issues. However, at that resolution text readability goes to crap with pixelation.

So I saw earlier in this thread a mention to link to higher resolution image. Does RW have a "link to file" type of snippet anywhere? I can't find it. The ones that refer to inserting file types seem to want to import the files into RW, not just provide an external link.

Thanks for any help you might have.

I reduce map and image sizes and after I get them reduced to an appropriate size I run through an image optimizer. You can get a jpeg image size down by about 25%-50% with it. See the thread on image optimization. VTT applications like FG have size recommendations for images. If your image is a map that is too big too big you may need to break it up into smaller images. This is common if you have battle map.

Try this:

1. Make a text snippet.
2. Right-click in the snippet.
3. Select Hyperlink.
4. Fill out the fields.
5. The address can be a file link such as:
   W:\The Rehberg-Courdy Saga\PC'er\Ronan Rehberg-Courdy\Character Sheet\Ronan Rehberg-Courdy.ods

Notice, that when you click the link the linkk is handed over to the operative system and Windows takes over, looks at the link and opens the default program for the filetype in the link and loads the file into the program. All outside of RW.


If you have a .jpg-file in the link Windows would use your default iamge program to show the picture.



Try and play around with it.

This works! Thanks!

:-) .