It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. — Eleanor Roosevelt
I don't see image sprites used that much anymore, but it's still a good technique for reducing downloaded decorative image assets when you have multiple on a page. The big idea is combining all the graphics into one and then shifting around the size and background-position to reveal one at a time.
Say you're site needs dozens or hundreds of country flags — that's a perfect opportunity for a sprite. Michael P. Cohen has built a generator site to help … Read article
Gatsby does a great job processing and handling images. For example, it helps you save time with image optimization because you don’t have to manually optimize each image on your own.
With plugins and some configuration, you can even setup image preloading and a technique called blur-up for your images using Gatsby. This helps with a smoother user experience that is faster and more appealing.… Read article
The Web is smothering in useless images. These clichéd, stock images communicate absolutely nothing of value, interest or use. They are one of the worst forms of digital pollution because they take up space on the page, forcing more useful content out of sight. They also slow down the site’s ability to download quickly.
:laugh: :cry:
It's so true, isn't it? How much bandwidth and electricity is spent sending middle-aged-man-staring-into-camera.jpg?
Great photography can be a powerful emotional … Read article
There are all these sites out there that want to help you with your images. They do things like optimize your images and help you serve them performantly.
That's a very good thing. By any metric, images are a major slice of the resources on websites, and we're notoriously bad at optimizing them and doing all the things we could to lower the performance hit from them. So you use some service to help you deliver images better. Smart. Many of them will make managing and optimizing images a lot easier. But I don't consider them a no-brainer. There is a lot to think about, like making choices that don't paint you into a corner.
I recently found a solution to dynamically update the color of any product image. So with just one <img /> of a product, we can colorize it in different ways to show different color options. We don’t even need any fancy SVG or CSS to get it done!
We’ll be using an image editor (e.g. Photoshop or Sketch) and the image transformation service imgix. (This isn’t a sponsored post and there is no affiliation here — it’s just a … Read article
Let’s take a look at a super lightweight way to create a horizontal masonry effect for a set of arbitrarily-sized photos. Throw any set of photos at it, and they will line up edge-to-edge with no gaps anywhere.
The solution is not only lightweight but also quite simple. We’ll be using an unordered list of images and just 17 lines of CSS, with the heavy lifters being flexbox and object-fit.… Read article
I just did this the other day so I figured I'd blog it up. There is a thing called Git Large File Storage (Git LFS). Here's the entire point of it: it keeps large files out of your repo directly. Say you have 500MB of images on your site and they kinda need to be in the repo so you can work with it locally. But that sucks because someone cloning the repo needs to download a ton of … Read article
Say you have an image you're using in an <img /> that is 800x600 pixels. Will it actually display as 800px wide on your site? It's very likely that it will not. We tend to put images into flexible container elements, and the image inside is set to width: 100%;. So perhaps that image ends up as 721px wide, or 381px wide, or whatever. What doesn't change is that image's aspect ratio, lest you squish it awkwardly (ignoring the … Read article
IntersectionObserver has made lazy loading a lot easier and more efficient than it used to be, but to do it really right you still gotta remove the src and such, which is cumbersome. It's definitely not as easy as:
<img src="celebration.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="..." />
The first time I made an image responsive, it was as simple as coding these four lines:
img {
max-width: 100%;
height auto; /* default */
}Though that worked for me as a developer, it wasn’t the best for the audience. What happens if the the image in the src attribute is heavy? On high-end developer devices (like mine with 16GB RAM), few or no performance problems occur. But on low-end devices? It’s another story.… Read article