Optimise a page with 5000 images

[leehughes]

Hi,

I have made a creative project http://www.bollocks-to-poverty.com/grid/

In which I will try and raise £10,000 for charity…

I need to get this page highly optimised due to the amount of images.. I was thinking of add a lightbox effect to each photo which, i’m guessing would mean that it would be a very heavy load for the page as it would have to load the full image first right?

Is there anyway I can do to speed everything up? Will I still have be able to have the lightbox plugin without too much delay? Anything else I can do to speed everything up as much as possible?

Thanks

[TheDoc]

5,000 images on one page? Nay nay. You can set up some pagination – maybe a max of 50 images per page. That’s how you optimize!

[leehughes]

no i need 5000 images

http://www.bollocks-to-poverty.com/collage/

[TheDoc]

Ooohhhhh I see… hmmmm… that’s a tough one.

Other than optimizing each image individually, I’m not sure I have a solution for you. Having said that, linking to an image via lightbox won’t make it pre-load – so you shouldn’t have to worry about that.

[leehughes]

hmm..

Well i’m going to smush every image and i’m hopefully moving to a dedicated server and I have adding nice stuff to my .htaccess file

The part i’m confused with is do I upload a 13 by 13px like in the link or if i can upload a 300×200 photo add the lighbox effect to each one..

Wouldn’t the larger image mean something has to re-size the image to fit in the grid? Wouldn’t this cause delay in loading?

[TheDoc]

"leehughes" wrote:

Wouldn’t the larger image mean something has to re-size the image to fit in the grid? Wouldn’t this cause delay in loading?

Yes – I was thinking more of manually creating the gallery – where you would create a separate thumbnail file for each photo. I’m not sure if you do it dynamically that a new file is created – are you using WordPress for this?

[leehughes]

yup wordpress

[EhhWhat]

isnt there a jquery plugin that will only load content on the page if its visibile? So as a users scrolls down your site it will then load the next line of images and the next etc rather than loading them all at once?

[leehughes]

Not too sure..

[TheDoc]

"leehughes" wrote:

yup wordpress

Hmmmm that could be trouble then – it will probably try to load each image in full. I don’t know enough about how it is creating the thumbnail to help you though – not sure if it’s creating a new file or not.

Sorry Lee!

[leehughes]

No probs..

I will have to upload the 13px photos and hope for the best :)

[leehughes]

what about creating a single image with all photos and using an image map?

Someone told me that today which would be the highest performing way. I would only have to load one image then. Is this right?

[TheDoc]

You could do that, but it would be a pain in the ass to set up.

[leehughes]

couldn’t be worse than adding 5000 images then re-arranging them to spell the word then adding them again in the right order

[TheDoc]

haha no, that sounds like a pain in the ass as well.

I’m looking forward to seeing the final product of this (I still don’t particularly have a good idea of what you’re trying to accomplish!) – so be sure to let us know when you’re done!

[Author]

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