slicing pics into sections

[nolimits4]

i see many website do this
they have picture slice layers but put together as a whole


my question is two folds:
1.why do they slice it instead of just keeping it whole?

2. which program does this?



ex. http://www.gloryhole.com/tourx/?nats=MTI6Mzo0,0,0,0,0 top pic

[sunfunbill]

They slice it for one or both of two reasons:

1. A full page picture would load real slow. Slicing it into smaller pictures lets each one load faster.

2. Different sections of that picture has different links. You slice the pic and each section has it's own url to go to.

Almost all image programs do that. Paint shop pro and up, just look in the tools or something like that.

[balls_deep]

photoshop will do it as well

[nolimits4]

lol i feel like such an idiot

thanks it make good sense now

[Cozy Monica]

It's also the easiest way to create fancy layouts because you can create them as one big image in photoshop, and then slice them up to fit an HTML layout.

Like already mentioned, then you can have various parts of the image linked to places and such...

and then your layout looks all nice and perfect.

[Hammer]

You actually don't need to slice big images as much as we did when everyone had dialup. The truth is that the image won't load any faster because all the separate pieces add up to the same amount of kilobytes as the large unsliced image, but when someone is on dialup, it gives the illusion of loading faster because instead of seeing one large image load from the top down, you see several smaller images all loading at the same time and you don't end up with a huge white space while the big image is loading.

It's actually not necessary to slice images just so you can have multiple link spots because you can create an image map with hotspots for any large image.

One good reason for slicing images now is if you want to do things like have an animated section of the image or wrap a large image around something like a flash video. Or maybe you want to have something load in an iframe within a large image, like a form.