Image and Thumbnail customisation

[tcshadow]

Is there a way I can access the thumbnails of the images so I can hack them up in photoshop and optimise for better speed?

My site is slowed down quite a bit by the images loading when people look in the categories and I was wanting to speed up load times by optimising the thumbnails.

alternatively where would I modify the size(dimensions) of the
thumbnails?

are there any obvious things i can do to make my shop run as fast as possible? any particular settings i should have turned on or off?

I know the cart is prety optimised as is but i'd like to tweak the max out of it.

[michael_s]

For speed, turn off category counts, don't use the dhtml categories menu, turn on the page cache, optimize your images to be as small as possible in file size.

To access the thumbnails, just ftp download them to your computer from the server, and optimize in whatever application you prefer. You had to upload them at some point, so you probably already have them on your computer somewhere.

[tcshadow]

For speed, turn off category counts, don't use the dhtml categories menu, turn on the page cache, optimize your images to be as small as possible in file size.

To access the thumbnails, just ftp download them to your computer from the server, and optimize in whatever application you prefer. You had to upload them at some point, so you probably already have them on your computer somewhere.

Category counts are off by default afaik,
I'm not sure what a dhtml categories menu is... is it an option in admin that i can toggle?
I put page cache on but it stopped the site from working for the standard one and it threw up errors for chemos addon so i turned that back off for the time being...

I will redo all the images but I have almost 900 products atm so it will be a pretty tedious job doing them all. Need to find a good batch program I think.

The thumbs seem to be dynamically generated... as in i can change their size in admin panel. Are they generated from the images every time you load a category? if so that would be pretty crazy on server load wouldn't it?

Excuse me if i say stupid things... I tend to know just enough to be dangerous when it comes to these things.