Hi, I have a course with loads of screenshots in it and the overall course file size is huge. I will work with the graphic designers to reduce the original file sizes.
However, what is the reason for including an ‘original’ and ‘uploaded’ version of the file when they are both the same file?
I’ve always wondered about this as it can often unnecessarily bloat the overall course file size.
Can this be turned off?
Thanks in advance.
One method would be to use an online tool to compress your images before inclusion, e.g., https://imagecompressor.com/
An alternate solution that I’ve had much better results with would be to host the images elsewhere, e.g., AWS S3 Bucket or HubSpot, etc., and then link to them using that functionality within the image component (rather than directly uploading them into the Course). This way, they retain superior quality and this method can also greatly reduce the file size of your course as it won’t directly contain the images themselves.
I too was not satisfied by the compression of images initially but switching to this method solved that.
Identical concept to hosting a video on YouTube or Vimeo and then simply linking to it.
Of course, there is a monetary element as you, or your organisation, may have to pay for a hosting solution if you don’t already have one.
Hi unique,
Thank you for the suggestion of hosting the images elsewhere. I’ve never actually done this due to the additional cost but I’ll take another look at it.
In the meantime, I’ll compress the source images.
Cheers 
Is using .SVG an option?
Not in this case Andy, but thanks for the suggestion.
I use SVG when I can but this course is full of screenshots. I’m wondering now if Evolve was the best tool for this course. Nothing against Evolve which is my go-to tool, but I think another tool may have been better for this systems-based training.
I’ve nearly finished compressing the PNGs to be 8-bit and it’s made a massive difference.
I still wonder why the assets folder has the ‘uploaded’ version of the files though.
Hi Barry, I will chase that up and find out.
Cheers-Sam
@BarryBPS uploaded.png is the original file you upload and will never be amended by Evolve.
The file original.png does get modified if you crop the image use Evolve’s ‘image crop’ functionality.
Note that although uploaded.png exists in the course .zip file when you publish, it will never get downloaded by a learner when they view the course.
It’s exported in the course .zip to allow the course to be imported back into Evolve with all the original assets intact.
So, you could actually delete all copies of uploaded.png from a published Evolve course to reduce the course .zip file size and speed up the process of uploading the course to your LMS - but with the caveat that if you re-import that .zip you will lose the uploaded.png for all assets in the course (even if they already existed on your Evolve instance)
Compressing your images using something like tinypng before uploading them into Evolve is definitely recommended - particularly for PNG files which always seem to get exported from tools like Photoshop with really high file sizes.
Choosing an appropriate image format can also help… typically jpeg is the best format for purely photographic images (that have no transparency). I’d really like to get support for WEBP images added to Evolve soon as they seem to be the best all-round choice - and are now supported by all current browsers (except, for some reason, Safari on macOS v10)
Hi Matt, this is really helpful. One of the things I love about Evolve is that you can import any course back into it. And it’s good to know that the uploaded.png is what keeps the image files intact.
I used Photoshop to convert the PNGs to 8-bit and that has done the trick.
Many thanks,
Barry
