HI there,

We are facing an issue where we need to replace every image in a finished course with lower-res / more-compressed versions.

Is there a way to do that in bulk?

The source images are a mix of PNG and JPG.

Many thanks in advance.

P.S. I'm aware there is a setting to apply additional image compression when generating the publishable HTML. I have tested that and unfortunately it is not compressing the images enough for our immediate needs.

Hi Leon,
I'm glad you mentioned the Image Compression option in Edit > Lesson Settings, because I was definitely going to suggest that first.

No, there is not a way to bulk replace the images in your sb/sb4 file - you will have to do that manually.

In the published output, all of the image files are in the assets folder. So you could run a quick batch process using Photoshop or some other photo editor on all the files in that folder and replace them that way. As long as they have the same name/extension, you can swap those images out and the lesson won't know the difference. Then just re-zip the package and upload to the LMS (or however you're deploying the lesson).

Hope that helps! Let me know if anything is unclear.

- Nav

Hi,

Thank you. We did already use that option as a quick-fix, but our client now needs us to fix it in the source file.

This particular course has both desktop and phone layouts, so many images require two versions (optimised for each layout) and I've now realised that when I swap an image in the editor, the old image still exists in the alternate layout. I then right-click the image and select "Synchronise" with the other layout, which removes the old image, but also resets the x/y coordinates too, so I then need to switch to the alternative layout and check the images are still not visible in that layout.
In summary, this is a painfully laborious process.

FYI I have experience with Lectora in which image swaps can be done from a centralised menu, so this job would be a lot easier in Lectora. I’m only mentioning this to point out that other competing tools have addressed this issue.

Hi Leon,
Make sense - we haven't had many requests for bulk swapping in SmartBuilder so we haven't invested in that feature. I'll add it to our enhancement list, though!

Personally, I would NOT use the synchronize feature because it does sync X and Y and size. I would make a pass through your lesson in each layout and manually replace the images. But I'm also not sure how many lessons / images you have. Let me know the rough scale of your task (and how much more you have to do), and we can see if there's some other workarounds that we can suggest.

Hope that helps!

Hi Leon,
If you still have a lot of these to do, please email us one of your source files, or upload it here.

We'll take a look and see if there's an easier way to accomplish this.

- Nav

Hi,

Thanks for your help. The course is not our intellectual property, so we decided we couldn't share it with you. But we have completed the work now.

I have a few quality-of-life items I'd like you to consider...

1) After clicking the "select image" button in the right properties menu, it takes a further 2 clicks to open the file explorer. The 2nd and 3rd clicks feel unnecessary to me, especially as an experienced user.
1a) I know we can double-click an image to bring up a file explorer, but sometimes it’s easier to select the image via the layers pane where the ability to double-click isn't directly accessible.

2) When replacing an image, SmartBuilder does not respect the dimensions the image was originally set to (the dimensions of the source image take precedence). We intentionally use hi-res images in our courses and then scale them down by 50% in the editor. This means during the image-swap process we needed to take the additional steps to click the "Copy xy & wh" then "Paste xy & wh" with every image swap.

3) Please give us an option to prevent an image (or indeed any object) from existing in any way on the alternative layouts. In other words, make it possible to have objects that only exist in one layout. The way I imagine this working is the properties panel has a dropdown list of all the layouts that object exists on, and we can then de-select a layer to make the object disappear on that layer. A helpful alternative method would be to group-select objects in a layout, then have a right-click option to “remove selected items from this layout”.

Thank you.

Hi Leon,
I appreciate your detailed list of enhancements. I've added them to our enhancement list, and we'll review these and see if we can make this process easier in the future.

I do know for the multiple clicks, we intentionally added the ability to unassign media from an Image object without deleting it, which came from another user request.

I think bulk-replacing images throughout an entire lesson is pretty rare event. If the need ever comes up again, please contact us - we have a method that we can use involving a workaround with the files in the backend. We can show you how to do that with a sample lesson.