Uploading large books
I’m working on a book of a trip with a lot of high res photos. When I exported a backup, the file was almost 700Mb. It had 350 photos in it, and I’m only half done. The end result will be a book about 150 pages long. Now I know I could go through and resize the photos one at a time to reduce the resolution to fit each application, but that would be quite time consuming. I would not be surprised if there are practical limits to how large upload can be. Have people uploaded books, 1.5 to 2 gigabytes to the service? Any 100 plus photo-heavy books? I’m just concerned I’m building something that I won’t be able to get a product out of. Royal
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As long as you have a decent broadband connection you should be fine. Last night I uploaded my book which I have been working on for a week. It is only half done but I wanted a trial print. It is 180 pages and had 519 photographs. Last time I backed it up it came to 945MB, but it seems like the upload is considerably smaller. I think BookSmart must compress/resize the images before they are uploaded. The whole upload only took something like an hour, if that (I wasn’t timing it!) and after the "processing images" progress bar reached the end, the "uploading image bar" appeared, part complete, with a total file size of only just over 200MB. Once I complete my book it will likely be 350 – 400 pages, with maybe 1,000 photographs. I wonder whether I might be better off doing two volumes though, as binding seems to be a major problem with thick books, from what I have read on here!
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Sorry, that should say: ’...after the "processing images" progress bar reached the end, the "uploading file" bar appeared, part complete, with a total file size of only just over 200MB.’
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That’s exactly what I wanted to see. That tells me they were smart enough to do exactly what you descibe. No point it uploading data that would work out to 1200 dpi detail when the printing process runs at 300dpi. Resize everything down to a dpi that matches the printing process and it optimizes everything…. the upload, the rendering on their machines. And they get to use the customer’s CPU to do the work. It tells me the technical people at blurb are smat enough technically to show some technical savvy that benefits customers and blurb. I won’t have to worry about resizing giant photos to use as small ones. Now, of course, how well the photos render down is a direct result of the rendering algorithm they chose to use. There are many variants. We have to hope for the best there. I’ve seen a few that are terrible, but most the differences are so fine, it doesn’t show up in print for 99% of the eyes looking at them. Thanks. That was exactly what I needed.
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