Picture loading

BobC

@Erin Holohan Haskell Over the last 5 or 6 weeks I've noticed that posts with a number of pictures load and then the text jumps around as each picture loads, this makes reading a post harder than it should be because of all the jumping around. I've noticed on both my computers using Firefox.

Anybody else having this problem?

Bob

SWEI

I see the same thing here. It's most obvious on threads with a lot of images in multiple posts.

I'm guessing this may caused by a coding decision to load full resolution images inline, rather than storing scaled-down versions and displaying those in the HTML.

Fred

I am seeing the same thing also @BobC . I am also using FireFox.

Erin Holohan Haskell

Thanks for the heads up. We'll look into this.

SWEI

It's happening all over the web right now. Nobody was really planning for 4mb images being common, and most smartphones don't reduce image sizes by default.

SWEI

Full resolution images are still very helpful when we need to look at details, but they should not be loaded initially. If I click on the image, the new frame/window should bring up the full version.

DanHolohan

Valuable feedback and thoughts, guys. Thanks!

Erin Holohan Haskell

Yes, thanks very much!

Our tech team agrees that this is the result of large images taking longer to load than the rest of the page. So let's try to keep images sized for Web. Thanks!

BobC

The problem is almost any camera generates a huge file because it's a lot cheaper to supply a 20MB sensor (usually noisy and somewhat fuzzy) than a decent lens. It is unrealistic to expect people to create a small image file for a site

Why can't we go back to the thumbnail that doesn't expand till you click on it. That worked well for years.

Bob

SWEI

That's a workaround, of course -- but having access to full resolution photos is often quite valuable. Is there some reason Vanilla can not scale them for inline (preview) display? Remember that not so many years ago, "sized for the web" meant 800x600 (and at one time it was 320x240.)

Steamhead

Some of the other boards I'm on don't even let you post a pic that large. The smallest allowed size on these is 650x650.

On here, I try to reduce mine before posting to no more than 800x600. That's plenty big enough for the Web. Compare my postings to some of those that take forever to load and you'll see the difference.

SWEI

Here's what Firefox sees -- note the original dimensions and scaling (which is being done in the browser, so it has to load the entire image before displaying):

Erin Holohan Haskell

Thank you all for your helpful feedback. Vanilla does not have preview functionality yet, but our contact has put in a suggestion with R&D for it. So hopefully we will have a better solution for this in the future. Thanks for helping us get better and better!