When uploading or importing images into an OLEFA project, directory, message, assignment… OLEFA offers the possibility to automatically transform the images:

A) Image quality
In order to offer a good experience to the visitor or user of your website (especially if the Website is accessed with a slow Internet connection), and in order to save unnecessary disk space, images are compressed. The chosen compression method is optimized for photo consulting on websites.

B) Image dimensions
If your original image has a large resolution, the size of the image file can also be drastically reduced by resizing the image.
OLEFA chooses the optimal resolution according to the tool or place where you are uploading / importing the image. For example, images for a wiki project will get a higher resolution (since a full-screen view is offered to the visitor of the project) than images for a storyboard (where images don't need to be larger than the storyboard canvas).
Next to the checkbox that offers the switch for using image transformation, you are also informed about the dimensions that will be used. Note that the aspect ratio of the images will always be respected; whatever length (width or height of the original) reaches the maximum value first will be determining and the other length will be resized proportionally. If the original image is already smaller than the specified resolution, it will not be resized at all; images are never stretched during the transformation.

C) Image orientation
Many photo cameras save meta-information about the camera orientation in the Exif-data of the image, so that images are immediately shown in the correct orientation. Operating systems and programs also use this information when showing the image, or even just change this information when you try to rotate it instead redrawing the picture (in order to allow faster manipulation).
However, many web browsers don't respect this information when displaying it, so that it could occur that users have seen an image correctly before uploading it to a website, and suddenly the image seems to be wrong after embedding it.
In order to avoid this phenomenon, OLEFA also considers this Exif information during its automatic image transformation and rotates the image accordingly (by really redrawing the image).

A) Upload via Drag&Drop
In many tools and places, OLEFA offers the possibility to upload images simply by dragging them from you desktop or from a folder into the respective tool. For example, whenever you see this icon on your OLEFA website, you have the possibility to drag files onto the symbol. If the tool or function allows the upload of images, they will automatically transformed according to the aforementioned criteria.



B) By choosing the respective option
When you click on the "Add file" symbol, a dialogue opens that lets you decide if you want the images to be transformed according to the aforementioned criteria or not. The respective checkbox is checked by default:



Note that images are only transformed during uploads ("This device") or during an import via Microsoft OneDrive®. By choosing images from your website's resources manager ("This website"), images will never be transformed, since the system only creates a reference to a file that already exists on your server.

By the way: if you use the file selector in a situation where no images are allowed as file-type (e.g. in a video element of a wiki project), the checkbox will not be offered.

In most cases, the image transformation is useful, because it speeds up the upload process, the visitors' user experience and saves storage space on your server.

However, in some cases, it might be useful to turn off the automatic transformation, for example:

• for graphics, icons or logos that contain transparent backgrounds (since these will be changed to black when the image is redrawn)
• for diagrams, mind maps or graphics that contain text (since the compression methods are optimized for photos, small text might be harder to read after the compression)
• for images that you have already compressed to very specific criteria in an external graphic program
• for images that are meant to be archived on the website, or are meant to be used later on for high quality printing

In order to do so, you cannot use drag&drop, but need to click on the "select file" icon to open the specific dialogue. There you can disable the checkbox and then start your upload by clicking on "This device". (If the upload allows multiple images, for example in an image gallery, you can select multiple files simultaneously by holding down CTRL resp. CMD while clicking on them.)