Image loading speed?

[freakmode]

Hi

On certain pages of our site we have around 40 product images each around 8-10K in size. I have noticed that when you view these over dialup or ISDN all you see is a white page untill about 80% of these images are loaded, only then do you get to see the logo and nav bar menu.

Is there a setting for this preloading or does anyone know how we can have the images load from top to bottom one at a time.

At lease with this method the dial up users would not think that the page is broken.

[pinbrook]

the recommended page weight for dialups is 40-50K.

I think you will have to make your images much smaller and use the popup for a larger image.

[freakmode]

Can't really make the images any smaller. Nothing worse than having to open every thumbnails to tell its a blue one..

I guess I could split the products over a number of pages to reduce the load time. Its a very odd problem, I just tried it again and it loaded the images from top to bottom one after the other. Other times it just seems to save them all up and show then all in one go.

[pht]

Your front page image, though very good, is almost 70k in size, anyone on dialup visiting for the first time, ie image not in cache, would be waiting quite a while just to load the first image.

One suggestion may be to split this large image up into several smaller ones.

Using Macromedia Fireworks for exampel you can split a large graphic up into many smaller ones, which load faster..

Just a suggestion....


Peter

[pinbrook]

Can't really make the images any smaller. Nothing worse than having to open every thumbnails to tell its a blue one..

that is a matter of opinion.....I prefer to be able to skim up and down a page of loads of products quickly and then decide if I'm interested enough to view a larger image.

If I wanted to know if it was a blue one, I'd expect that in the product description

But realistically 40 products a page is too many, try 20. Also I'm sure you could optimise your images to be 5 or 6 k each rather than 8-10k

[freakmode]

Thanks Peter

It always used to be be split into 4 parts, not sure why it fused back or when.

I'll fix that up this week.

[chris ashdown]

I found that if you use a quite cheap software program Adobe Photoshop elements about £40 then they have a save for web option that offers a large selection of options to reduce jpg file sizes whilst keeping a check on visual quality.

Enclosed a sample of your jpg in original and reduced format

[Queenswood]

We use "Easy Thumbnails" for resizing & making the thumbnails as it is freeware you can download it from Here

I hope this helps it will do a complete directory full of images in jpg or gif format. I would also say keep the size of the image to 5-10k Max. anything higher than that your dialup customers are going to struggle.

Thanks

Dave

[chris ashdown]

Here is the big one reduced