CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phphtmlimage
khaverim
khaverim

Reputation: 3544

Image rendering speed optimization

I've got an application I'm building with PHP which calls photos from a database according to however many images there are for a given plant species. I have the script resize the otherwise large photos to 100x100. This process REALLY takes a bite out of page load time and my computer's CPU gets up to 100% and is working quite hard.

I think it's because all images are loading at once... Is there a way to have them load only when the previous one is finished? Or is there a more efficient way of rendering images like this? Here is the snippet that loads 'em:

$imagesArray = explode(", ",$images);
unset($imagesArray[count($imagesArray)-1]); // get rid of the last array key which is blank.
echo '<tr><td>Images:</td><td>';
foreach ($imagesArray as $imgloc)
{
  echo '<a target="_blank" href="plant_images/'.$imgloc.'"><img src="plant_images/'.$imgloc.'" width="100" height="100" alt="'.$row[2].'" title="'.$row[2].'" /></a>&nbsp;';
}

Here is a screenshot of a partially loaded image in the page (this is a lot better than what happens other times! Seriously, some species have 10-12 images and my computer takes about 15 seconds to load the page, painfully)

http://www.captainscall.site11.com/temp_stuff/slow-img.png

I found this already, mildly helpful. Thank you kindly, Khanahk

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1889

Answers (2)

Vinh TRAN
Vinh TRAN

Reputation: 52

I think you should:

  • Serverside: you need to cache an image if it already generated, the next time you can use the cache version. You can create a physical image file for next used.

  • Client side: you can use library to lazy load your image

Upvotes: 2

igr
igr

Reputation: 4976

The users browser will usually cache the images, so that the user will only experience slow loading the first time he/she visits the page.

However, you should consider having thumbnails of all the images that are being displayed. You don't need to make these thumbnails your self, in 2013 we have computers to do that.

A quick google search will probably give you some software that can make resized copies of all your pictures in no time, or if you know some coding you can make your own script to to this. You can for instance use Imagick in PHP (see http://php.net/manual/en/imagick.scaleimage.php). Then just store two sizes of the images on your server, one for thumbnails and one set with higher resolution.

One advantage of doing this is that you will decrease the outgoing data from your server (if your server has a lot of unique visitors, there will be a lot of traffic due to the size of the images). Also your users will experience less loading time for your site (as you said, waiting for images to load is boring).

You could probably tell the browser with javascript in what order to load the images, but that wouldn't solve your problem, which mainly is that your images are too big.

Upvotes: 2

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