Windows Live Writer 2009 is Bad for Blog Site Bandwidth |
If your using Windows Live Writer, and you copy and paste images [for like taking screenshots], you may be unaware that Windows Live Writer is doing you a disservice by not using an optimized image. Or by not offering a choice when posting images.
When images are pasted in to Windows Live Writer the program inserts them as a PNG file. PNG’s are not as compressed as JPG and therefore resulting in larger images, more storage requirements and more bandwidth; resulting in a slower website.
Take a look at my examples…
I’m using a plain Jane screenshot program. I copied an image from an email and then pasted it in to Windows Live Writer.
It doesn’t matter which screenshot program your using. It applies when you’re copy and pasting images in to Windows Live Writer.
My first test was pasting directly in to the Windows Live Writer program. Image is inserted, looks fine, and notice the image type, PNG; and the size of the PNG image- almost 30k.
I took the same image and pasted it in to irfanview, and simply saved it as a JPG; nothing special just saved it. And then I dragged the image from my desktop [where I saved it] in to Windows Live Writer. By doing this, it tells Windows Live Writer to preserve the image type [apparently].
Notice the image type and then notice the image size, 13k, less than HALF of the PNG file.
I found this out and then I went searching. I can’t find anything about this; nothing out there telling about this. Seems kinds odd. There’s normally a bunch of uber-geeks that notice this stuff and cry foul- this time, I can’t find them.
I can’t find any plug-ins to address this in Windows Live Writer, but what I did find was SMUSH.IT for Wordpress, but it doesn’t apply to PNG files. I emailed them to see if there’s anything they could do about maybe adding this feature [to handle JPG files].
So, by actually converting your images to JPG first and then importing them in to Windows Live Writer, you’ll save, bandwidth and increase your web page load speed, AND you might be able to store more images/data online now with your HOST of choice.
Hope this helps someone.
| Update October 04, 2009: I received this Twitter [ScottisaFool] about another plug-in or a new plug-in that addresses this issue. Here’s the link. And 64-bit’rs- you’ve to copy the DLL from the folder to the Windows Live Writer/plug-in folder as a temp solution. |
Thanks,
L. Henry Jr.
http://www.lehsys.com
Dictated with Dragon NaturallySpeaking v10.
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Windows Live Writer 2009 is Bad for Blog Site Bandwidth http://bit.ly/qaQBd
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
http://bit.ly/BblnT Windows Live Writer 2009 is Bad for Blog Site Bandwidth | LEHSYS http://bit.ly/2P1Ahl
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
I am one of the developers of Windows Live Writer. This can be a major issue and I understand your concern.
It would be possible to create a plugin for Windows Live Writer that you can insert images through that allows you to optimize them anyway you want. At one point, we even had a plugin that could do this so we could give it to anyone that was interested. Though, I am afraid I can't find it anymore.
Allowing users to configure image compression is one of the features we are investigating for the next version of Windows Live Writer.
A Wordpress server side plugin would also work as you mentioned.
If you have any more concerns or feedback please feel free to let us know, you can email us directly at wlw-team@microsoft.com
Brandon,
'ScottisaFool' has a plug-in that helps with the issue I describe, but
it's not an ideal solution; nothing against Scott.
I placed the information in my post at the bottom as an update. The
point of my post is to point out that having every image on your blog
doubled in size can hurt your site performance and also hurt you as far
as bandwidth charges go…
With all the ISP's jumping on the bandwidth caps/limits this is going to
affect all the browsing customers as well.
I'm interested to see what holds in store in the next version of Windows
Live Writer.
Thanks for your comments.
Enjoy.
Seconded. PNG are simply too big. If they can get PNG in there, y not JPG as the default?
I agree with you completely. I'm really hoping that they have a new
release in January 2010.
Thanks for your comments.
Hey, thanks for the info. I didn't know dragging/dropping the file in to the document converts it to jpeg