Originally Posted by
rstevenson
You might lead someone astray with that. They may think Zen Cart actually creates the right size images on the fly. But all it does is serve the image you've given it, and then the browser (not Zen Cart) squishes the image to fit the space available. Note that the image isn't remade in a new size, it just gets shrunk to fit. Most importantly, it is still its original size on disk (in terms of MB or KB), so each page of your store will draw more slowly than it would if you were using properly sized images.
So the purpose of the Medium and Large folders could be as you state, but also they are used to hold your manually re-sized images. That way the server isn't being stressed serving large images when only small ones are needed, and your browser isn't squishing the large images to fit small spaces, and your site isn't slower than it should be.
One other point most people are unaware of... when the browser reformats an image to fit the available space, there is no image optimization going on. The image will be whatever the browser can manage. You can do a much better job yourself using an image editing program.
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