As the internet speeds are going faster every day then everyone expects websites to load fairly quick. This also applies to a Prezi presentation. Nobody likes to wait minutes before your presentation loads up. While this might not be so important when browsing a Prezi online, then there are also situations where you need to quickly open up your Prezi, for example in a classroom.
I have actually seen a presentation on the topic “How to use Prezi” where the main image in the presentation didn’t even load due to slow internet connection, so the presenter couldn’t even start presenting. You can guess how funny it was to the audience.
Fortunately there are 2 main things you can do to drastically lower the size of your Prezi and make it load significantly faster:
1) Optimize/Crop images (without loosing quality)
A good tool Smush.it by Yahoo can optimize your images without lowering the quality. (EDIT November 2015 smush.it is no longer available, alternative Image Optimizer) This works especially well for large background pictures. Depending on your image, the compression can sometimes even save up to 80% on the file size. This might mean several megabytes for large backgrounds and can reduce the load time by dozens of seconds.
2) Replace raster images with vector graphics
Sometimes you don’t even need large JPEG or PNG images, when simple vector graphics can also do the trick. However this step is much more complicated and would require some work in a vector graphics editor.
Image test: Normal vs. Optimized vs. Vector
To prove how big the difference can be, I did a small test with a 3000x3000px image, that is essentially just a white square:
As you can see the differences between raster and vector images can be quite big. Of course such dramatic optimization cannot be achieved with any image, but it proves the point that there are possibilites to lower the size of your Prezi, without loosing any quality.
Need to optimize your large Prezi? We can do it for you, Contact us for a quote!
