Improve Gallery-Speed

Hi,

I did mention this last year in the Newspaper forum. The Speed of the gallery is not very good.

https://forum.tagdiv.com/topic/speed-of-the-gallery/

If have 30 Images or so, the loading time is like sh**. It would be better to load only the first image and the thumbnails of the other images.

Maybe you can add this in the future to your list.

Thank you!

The next images should load on click, not on first load.

http://dev.promicabana.de/das-ist-eine-testgalerie/

• This reply was modified 11 years by Bichareh.

One solution is to use a “lazy load” function, however this runs risk of some items not loading at all, if browser memory/cache times out.

What really sped up our use of such was using mod_pagespeed … this optimizes images including conversion to webp for Chrome, etc., caches with opcache if setup properly, etc.

And of course make sure the thumbs are highly compressed (like using the “50” setting in your functions.php vs default 90, etc.).

Better optimized images to start with helps also;
this image is 41kb and could be nearly half that, especially since B/W/greyscale:
http://dev.promicabana.de/wp-content/uploads/Justin-Bieber-21-Geburtstag-6-559x420.jpg

I’m sure you know all that … just chiming in as I tend to do. 🙂

Thanks for your reply! Is there a difference for the human eye between 50 and 90 percent?

Maybe I’ve gone crazy, but I loaded the link you provided and went to another gallery and several other pages as well and they all loaded fully, including all gallery images, within 2-3 seconds. Maybe you have already done something to fix your issues but if not, I’m not seeing the same problem you’re reporting.

@btreece84 (Slug Bite)
I activated lazyload via the WPRocket plugin. Works like a charme!

@neotrope (Chris)
Is it possible to compress only the thumbnails and not the full images via functions.php?

• This reply was modified 11 years by Bichareh.

Yes! The compression level setting (from my helpful optimization guide) only impacts thumbnails created by WordPress via server imagemagick/GD libs. — it does NOT change the images you upload —

so if you upload image at 40k full size
normal thumb at smaller size, might be 10-14k
set compression higher, thumb might be 7k

No real visible difference — a thumb is just supposed to be an image “hint” to the full page/photo — not presentational anyway.

Kind of like in Photoshop, the diff. between the “10” setting and “7” setting makes the photo half the size, with no real noticeable difference (except with images that have a lot of “red” — ). Jpeg is a “lossy” compression method no matter what (hence why DVDs with low bitrates look like crap also!).

Some people prefer a setting of “60” … but I’ve found “50” works fine unless it’s a portfolio site or something. OR, images with a LOT of “red” which is the bane of jpeg compression.

Try it… set compression to “50” (or “60”) — anything better than default of “90”! Then regenerate thumbnails.

For your full size images you need to start with better compression — or, use something like smush.it (if you can get that to work), or something like mod_pagespeed which will optimize then cache for you.

Anyway, that’s been my experience.

Glad to help 🙂

Thank you for your answer Chris, that helped me a lot!

Still there is no fix for the gallery. The Lazy Load option is not really a good solution. It would be perfect, if the theme developers can build a fast gallery without the help of external plugins.

Like this, but only native! It’s really fast. http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/royal-slider/gallery/

Thank you!

Hi
just remember if you have

20 images x 40kb = 800kb

optimized

20 images x 25kb = 500kb

thumbnails

20 x 20kb = 400kb

20 x 8kb = 160kb

1200kb vs 660kb

what do you think will load faster ?

I see this on car websites a lot … sitting there waiting for all the photos in the gallery to load. Annoying!!! 🙂

• This reply was modified 11 years by simchris.

Only the first big image + thumbnails should load. On demand the next big images. That would be great!

Hi,

a gallery like this would be nice. This gallery is made by the “Royal Slider” plugin, but I don’t want to use an external plugin to have a great and FAST gallery.

http://dev.promicabana.de/das-ist-eine-testgalerie/

The native gallery of your great theme is crap because of the loading time. That’s the only point I don’t like on this theme.

Can you please put this on your list for one of the next updates? I think, that would be a nice feature, not only for me, but also the thousand of other people, that are using your theme(s).

Thank you!

Great, Thank you! 🙂