Family Historian User Group

Hi all,
I recently found my diagrams and charts were taking much longer to load than previously. A little investigation showed the issue was with a couple of Country Flags I had created. I found that their size was over 320,000kb! Other Country Flags are in the range 1kb to 675kb. Regenerating these new flags to more reasonable size of around 250kb vastly improved the performance.
The Country Flags were created using IrfanView version 4.60 and were saved as .emf files.

I hope this tip may be of use to others.

The FH V7 Icons library has a Flags folder with 250 country flags in .emf format and sized as you say from 1 KB to 675 KB.
Presumably, your flags are for some other countries not in that library.

Absolutely correct, Scotland and Wales.

Perhaps they should be downloadable from the Knowledge Base Diagram icons possibly together with other reasonably sized flags for Ulster (6 & 9 county), Other Irish Provinces and British & Irish Counties? Perhaps we need a new icon group of "Irish/British sub 'UN-State' flags" - presumably added via the "Contribute > Add/Update a Download" Menu on the KB?

Ditto for US State flags etc.?

That would save others from downloading excessively sized "icons" from other sources?

davidf wrote: ↑

07 Dec 2022 14:15

Perhaps we need a new icon group of "Irish/British sub 'UN-State' flags" - presumably added via the "Contribute > Add/Update a Download" Menu on the KB?

Ditto for US State flags etc.?

That would save others from downloading excessively sized "icons" from other sources?

I look forward to receiving them via Add/Update Download in due course...

ColeValleyGirl wrote: ↑

07 Dec 2022 14:42

davidf wrote: ↑

07 Dec 2022 14:15

Perhaps we need a new icon group of "Irish/British sub 'UN-State' flags" - presumably added via the "Contribute > Add/Update a Download" Menu on the KB?

Ditto for US State flags etc.?

That would save others from downloading excessively sized "icons" from other sources?

I look forward to receiving them via Add/Update Download in due course...

David2416,

David2416 wrote: ↑

07 Dec 2022 13:16

Absolutely correct, Scotland and Wales.

You seem to have Scotland and Wales
Wikipedia seem to have copyright clear flags at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_flags and associated flags.
These need converting to emf format (which is Microsoft proprietary!) - so I have to find linux programs or plug-ins to do the conversions - or persuade Irfanview to "play nicely" on Wine/PlayonLinux.

So how to co-ordinate?
Open a new forum topic and post suitably formatted flags (3 at a time) and then someone (me, you?) download them and zip them into sensible libraries and upload to the KB?

Suitable format means emf format, file size less than 1kB, resolution at least 64 by 64 pixels?

David,

Open a topic in Maintaining the KB?

I'd be grateful if somebody other than me would handle most of the work... I certainly am not skilled enough to do the image conversion (especially bearing in mind the issues identified here re transparent backgrounds: 2021 Converted Icons (19216))

Done:

EMF icons - specifically sub-UN State flags (Munster, Scotland, Flanders etc.) (21263)

I have resized/resampled my Scotland Flag and the Ecuador Flag to have a height of 60 pixels using IrfanView. They are now 18kb and 17kb respectively. They seem to perform satisfactorily.
you will need to change the extensions back to emf.