Storing bitmaps efficiently?

[michdd]

The game that I'm currently making has many bitmaps, for the sheets for various things. Is there a way that I can store these efficiently so my flash file is huge?

[.ral:cr]

of course, you load them at runtime

[michdd]

This seems like a pretty newbie question, but how do I do that?

[RichSad]

loading them at runtime may or may not be an option. There are indeed some magic things you can do to reduce the the size of images (whether they are loaded at runtime or packed into the SWF). I can't talk about the specific implementation I use, but let me ask you this: if you had some file and you wanted to make it smaller, what would you do to it?