Max Riffner

The Parlor

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Preview Madness

We’ve been swiftly building our first image server at work, but a big problem occurred Friday: all of our new images decided to not display in Internet Explorer Windows. Thus began a maddening exploration into our set up and our different servers (more command-line than I care to shake a stick at). I finally found the solution today, and it’s a big one for designers on Macintosh especially (because all of our browsers, along with Mozilla flavors on Windows, will render the problem without trouble). If you just do a “Save As” in a version of Photoshop over 7.0 to make your JPEG, you will also inadvertently embed an XML “preview” of the data, which then causes Internet Explorer to choke in the downloading of the JPEG. Then, were you to navigate to other pages or sites, no images of any sort would download. You have to close down the browser completely, and the problem would re-occur were you to go to one of the pages where an offending image resided.

The workaround is to actually “Save for Web” your JPEGs in Photoshop. That eliminates the preview feature in your JPEGs.

Here is the difference visually between the files below:

While great that I found the answer, we now have to re-save over 12,000 product images. However, it is better than redoing them from their hi-res 300-600 dpi source files again. Plus, we still have another 10,000 to go (roughly), which we can safely start making again.

Phew!

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