Photoshop is stupid: it doesn't understand the brave new 72dpi, modem-friendly world we are trying to to create on the Web. Before you let it out on to the Internet on its own, it is a good idea to Net-train it a little.For a start, those cute thumbnail icons look great on my hard-disk, but they simply won't do for the Web. What happens when Photoshop adds an icon to your image (and that preview PICT that's supposed to be so much help when browsing for images) is that it adds a resource fork. Resource forks, as opposed to the data fork where your actual image lives, are no bad things in themselves. The trouble is that they can confuse some Internet applications which can't deal with such Mac-specific data. Worse, they can confuse people as well, who find that the file they've downloaded has something strange (to a PC nerd) embedded in it, and then they accuse you of spreading viruses. Don't laugh, this has actually happened to the author of this piece.
To
kill the icons open up the General Preferences dialogue. You'll find it
near the bottom of your File menu. On the right hand side you should find
a button marked "More...". This is how important Adobe reckons the cross-platform
issue is: it hides it away on an obscure dialogue of an obscure dialogue.
Click on More...
And the dialogue above should appear. If it hasn't, then you're running an older version of Photoshop (or a 4.0 alpha) and you'll have to hunt for it: it should look roughly the same. This is is the easy bit coming up: just switch off the custom icon and preview options by clicking Never (or Ask... you rebel, you). That's it: you've already shaved 3K off of your images, sped the Web up a fraction and set some PC paranoiac's mind at rest.Note for later: this is also where to come if you want to stop your EPS images being anti-aliased when you rasterise them. If you're crazy that is...
Related pages:some non-Photoshop tricks for improving your Web graphics.
Or:
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Page created by Jim Smith, May 20, 1996.