Efficient image resources (not bitmaps?)

[courtarro]

The program I'm maintaining has a large collection of BMP-format resources. As such, the binary is rather large. VS2005 allows me to load GIFs and JPEGs when importing resources, but then it wants to call them custom resources.

Is it possible to use a more efficient file format (than uncompressed BMP) without requiring a lot of changes to the way I load the existing resources?

 

[xwb]

I don't have VS2005 at the moment. You could try this. It may work.

1) Convert a bmp to a jpg
2) Rename the jpg back to bmp
3) See if the system will pick it up

Paint seems to pick up anything and auto convert it. Doesn't depend on the extension. Maybe the resources are the same. Try it and see. It may work, it may not.

 

[courtarro]

VS2005 doesn't like that. As far as I can tell, BITMAP resources can only be BMP files in proper bitmap format. However, BMP files can be RLE-compressed, which is not as efficient as GIF or JPG, but it helps a good bit. I tried that on my app and successfully trimmed off some excess size.

Photoshop can create RLE-compressed bitmaps.