On my wife’s art site, we obviously have a large number of paintings. Although we have compromised the size of the jpg files, a page like this one with ten thumbnails can still take some time to load over a slow dial-up.
Our website loads these pictures line for line, from top to bottom. On other sites I have also seen pictures load completely, but a bit blur, and then come into focus as more information is downloaded. I would actually prefer that.
So… the question is how do they do that? Is it something in the HTML that I don’t know? Is there a trick in Photoshop in preparing these pictures for the site? Thanks for any help you can give.
i believe you have to encode the jpeg’s in progressive encoding instead of standard. any decent pro paint program should have this option when saving. good luck.
Those thumbnails on “page 1” are in the 20-30K range. You can crush the file size possibly 60-80% with almost no reduction in visual quality. I’m not familiar with Photoshop, but there are sites like netmechanic.com where you can do it.
I don’t think you really want the blur to better image thing. It will take even longer for the thumbnail page to load. This technique is better suited where there is text to read and only a few images.
You can also possibly compress the larger images without loss to save bandwidth and reduce viewers wait. The difference between a 200K or a 100K image is almost impossible to discern for most viewers.