[chris]

I wrote earlier about this and to reiterate would state that the way xcart uses the code to redimension the image is not a good idea as either the thumbnail suffers or the larger image does. This is simply because the browser or the code can not employ advanced sampling techniques (bilinear or bicubic resampling) or even better enable the use of 2 separate images - one for the thumbnail and an entirely different image for the main image.

If you look at a lot of the xcarts out there you will find this poor image quality is quite pronounced on a number of the sites.

So I have paid the xcart developers to modify the code so that I can upload separate images for all the categories of images in xcart including:
thumbnails
main images
detailed images
banners
special images which I use to show brands and special offers
icons

ALL IMAGES ARE STORED OUTSIDE THE DATABASE WITH ONLY POINTERS TO THE IMAGES INSIDE THE DATABASE.

There is another real benefit in doing this and that is that the database does not get bloated with unmanageable BLOBS (Binary Large Objects) which produce reams of meaningless hexi text and makes it difficult to edit the database using phpMyAdmin for example.

BUT AND THIS IS IMPORTANT - IF YOU ARE USING A WINDOWS MACHINE FOR DEVELOPMENT YOU WILL FIND THAT WINDOWS WILL SCREW UP SQL DUMPS AS IT WILL INSERT INCORRECT NEW LINES.

INCIDENTALLY AGAIN IF YOU ARE USING A WINDOWS MACHINE YOU MUST MAKE SURE THAT IF YOU FTP ANY TEMPLATES TO YOUR SITE THAT YOU SET YOUR FTP CLIENT FOR BINARY AND NOT ASCII FOR THE .TPL EXTENSION.

Hope all this helps as I have learnt the above the very hard way!!

Chris