displaying thumbnails

blckspder

Hello,
I have an art page with alot of pics they are organized in layers. Ive seen several times on this site how you should database the links to the pics. Does that make them upload the the page quicker? because right now it takes to long for all the thumbnails to upload and view and if you open a layer before all the pics have finished they wont finish loading. You can see what Im talking about at
http://www.sousaink.com/art.php. Could anyone please point to a tutorial or a specific thread on this forum?
Antoni

AIS4U

blckspder:

Well, I went you your Web site and I have a question:

Why do you make me download all of the pictures?

I mean, maybe I am only interested in the photography, which contains only 13 photos, but I have to wait while all 40 photos load before I can view the photography section.

Of course the same is true with the other categories.

Why don't you split them up into the respective categories and only have them load when the category is clicked on?

This should make the download much faster or at least give that appearance. Making me wait 10 - 20 seconds after I have clicked a link is better than having me wait a minute or two while all 40 photos download.

As for the database thing, I know it is a little faster when you have an ASP page, but I am not sure with PHP. My guess is that it would speed things up at least a little, but it would still be much, much faster to just download the categories as requested.

Good Luck

blckspder

do you mean by putting them on seperate pages?

AIS4U

blckspder:

Well, I wasn't really thinking about separate pages.

I don't know how you have your PHP code set up, but my suggestion would be to let your page load without any call to any photo except the one large one that appears when the page loads.

Only after a user clicks on a category would any photos be downloaded and then only the ones in that particular category.

I don't recall what the number was, but when I went to your Web site it showed the number of items remaining to load at about 37 or so when your page first started to load. After it loaded there was only one photo viewable, the large one. What were the other items I was waiting to have download? My guess is it was all the photos being cached to my computer. Why do this? Why not wait until I click a category before any photos are downloaded, except for the large one?

Maybe I have misunderstood what is going on?

Anyway, nice art work!

blckspder

Oh alright I understand what your saying now thats a good idea. Ill work on getting the pictures to load only when they are called. Thanks for the idea

AIS4U

blckspder:

I'm not sure how you are storing your photos, maybe in a flat file or maybe in an array.

I think it would work to put them into separate arrays (one array for each category) and then just make a call to the particular array when a category is clicked on.

Not sure, but I think this would fix the long download time.

Good Luck