Hi everyone,

 

The company I work for is running a fairly beastly website with over 4000 products in their database. Each product has a series of attachments on the product page - technical specs, wiring diagrams, and images.

 

The images are photos of the products isolated on a white background (not 3D renders). Many of the images are available for customers to download at high resolution, and whoever heads up the website (in the US) has chosen to provide said images in BMP and EPS format.

 

Can anyone think of any decent reason as to why they would use the formats? I personally haven't used the BMP file format since I first started using digital cameras (which shot JPEGs) back in the late 90s, and I've only ever seen EPS used in the context of scaleable vectors.

 

I've no idea either, EPS for sure if required (vector) but I thought BMP went out with platform shoes and paisley shirts?

No that seems bizarre to me, the only reason I could see is if the original editor uploaded directly from a vector graphics editor.

 

I'm certain that EPS files can't be displayed as images on the web without a plugin. Even if they could, the file sizes are normally massive, much greater than a PNG or SVG version, and you can't do much compression on them either.

 

If you wanted to, you could set the site up on a local web server, and run a command to batch change the file extensions to something a bit more web safe. PHP and Imagemagik can do this fairly easily. I wouldn't attempt it on a live server until you're happy with the result.

Yep BMP is uncompressed and as such will result in huge file sizes, EPS can't really be used for photographs due to it being vector based. jpeg is the ideal file format for photographs and has been for a very long time.

Thinking about it, you could do the whole lot on your machine by downloading the image library, altering the file extensions, and uploading the library again. A task runner like Grunt technically could rename the file extensions, then compress the new JPEG's in one go.

I'm pretty sure that I was wearing a pair of adidas poppers the last time I used BMP.

 

Tucked into football socks?

Each product has a series of attachments on the product page - technical specs, wiring diagrams, and images.

 

I figured EPS for wiring diagrams?

 

Thinking about it, you could do the whole lot on your machine by downloading the image library, altering the file extensions, and uploading the library again. A task runner like Grunt technically could rename the file extensions, then compress the new JPEG's in one go.

 

I use a nifty php GD resizer which really does the trick for compression, resize and save. In theory you shouldn't need to download the lot, resize and upload. I would make a second folder and batch the primary folder into the second folder as it will leave the primary unedited

 

I figured EPS for wiring diagrams?

 

 

I use a nifty php GD resizer which really does the trick for compression, resize and save. In theory you shouldn't need to download the lot, resize and upload. I would make a second folder and batch the primary folder into the second folder as it will leave the primary unedited

 

The problem isn't the images, but the file extensions on the site. They will also need updating, and that won't be as straight forward, especially if they are stored in a DB.

 

Either way, there's going to be some backups required before executing anything.

eps can contain vector and/or bitmap data, though usually it's vector I haven't used eps since my newspaper days a long time ago.

 

if some downloads need to be vector would suggest either svg (which will also display in the browser) and/or illustrator or pdf depending on the customer's needs. otherwise it's gonna be jpeg for photos (if they need hih res for printing purposes you could use tif but not sure why they would need print res stuff... unless they're making their opwn brochure or need to otherwise display your product shots

I wouldnt do anything, I would send it back to the US company and make them resave the image and make sure they don't send you a stupid format again. Put it on them.

Thanks everyone! I was back working on the site this morning, looking at those JPEGs and EPSs and getting annoyed ... and then I remembered that I'd posted about it here! ;-)

 

Just to clarify, the EPS files aren't wiring diagrams - they're actual photos. But for whatever reason they have decided to give people the option as to which format they download the photo in - BMP or EPS.

 

Sadly it's out of my hands which format we use, so I'll just continue to shake my head in astonishment... ;-)

 

Thanks again!