Speed of Loading Pictures - all or partical [Archive]

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Launchnet

01-18-2007, 11:08 PM

I use a java script slide show for showing pictures, where the picture changes every 5 seconds.

I have heard that all pictures are immediately loaded each time that I open a page that has pictures.

Will someone please explain if pictures do all load at one time? When I open a page with lots of pictures as I do in my birdhouse page, it still loads very fast and the slide show is immediatly available if I click the slide show button.
I have 44 pictures that are loaded on this page.

Can someone explain to me how picture loading works?

Please check this at my website: www.openoursite.com
Click on "Hobbies" in the left menu and then click on "Birdhouses"

Thanks for the help.

KDLA

01-19-2007, 07:55 AM

In a normal HTML page, images load in the order in which they are placed in the coding. If one of the images part way down the page is huge, it can slow the progress of the rest downloading.

In an HTML page using CSS, the CSS images are loaded first because the linkage is in the <head> section or in the external CSS document, also linked in the <head>, then the images in the HTML follow. If CSS effects, such as image rollovers, are used, those images are loaded as the event occurs. (That's why some people experience that annoying flicker in IE.)

Like CSS, javascript is in the <head> section (either in whole or by a link), so those images are loaded first. (That's why some CSS coders like to use javascript to preload images for image rollovers.)

BTW -- I took a look at your birdhouses. Nice show. You may want to make the heights and widths of your photos consistent; there seems to be some image stretching occurring. If the image simply doesn't work in the predefined dimension, you might try adding white space to the height/width. I've done this with slideshows in the past, and it works well.

KDLA

Tabo

01-19-2007, 08:03 AM

There should be no problem, but why not use a javascript preloader to preload all the images before the page loads??

WebJoel

01-20-2007, 09:46 AM

Also, re-sizing the image to fit the targeted window instead of allowing the browser to 'stretch to fit' will reduce the workload the browser must perform. In effect, the browser will assign that width/height and merely fill it with the next picture, instead of doing the math first in order to make it fit. This would be especially useful for dial-up connections, which may find themselves waiting that extra second or two between image-swaps.