If i would chop up my images in a couple of pieces instead of one big picture would this be more helpfull in the loading time when loading a page in the browser? What would you do?
I don't see how it could help with load times - the browser still has to download all the pieces so overall page size is the same.
Breaking a picture into multiple pieces will actually make it load *slower* because the browser will have to make multiple HTTP requests to the server, all which take time.
Something i picked up... Point number two states it would help, this kind of confuses me Exam made a good logical post but now i see this article i don't know what to believe also i see it on firefox homepage that is G's page that holds smaller images instead of a whole image that could easily be done i guess. Would it still be better to slice things up? I would very much like to hear some feedback on this.
Do a test. Slice image and look at load time (FrontPage gives it) and compare to load time to non-sliced image. I too have read of image slicing but hav never tried. Shannon
Actually lot of people tell me that it helps to divide the images ... but I dont understand why...I am confused too...
Well like Smyrl said best to try it out and see what happens. I'll have to test it out and see if it has a faster loading time.
It depends on the kind of image. Sometimes you can compress parts of an image more than others, without losing the quality. That means you can slice the image up and make the overall download time smaller. Before slicing up your image look at what it is, perhaps part of it can be compressed more than other parts of it, or if part of the image can be a .gif and other parts a .jpg and save a few kb's. Someone that knows more about how jpeg compression works and how gif files work would know more, but as a general rule, if slicing try to slice image parts that are similar to achieve better compression.
I think point #2 is from a series of suggestions to make your page more visitor-friendly. With the rare exception LGRcomp talks about, the main purpose would be to give your visitors the APPEARANCE of faster loading, with bits of a large image appearing as they are downloaded. It's much like having a "loading" guage on a Flash page - the visitor can see something changing and is more likely to stick around to wait for the rest.
You may be right about type of image. I took one 556 pixels wide and tried splitting. Was successful in nearly trippling load time as estimated by FrontPage. Shannon
I don't know if this affects download time, but depending on the cluster size of your hard drive, a 33k image could actually take up 48k of space. A 45k image would also take up 48k of space as well. Again, not sure if that affects download time or not, but I presume it would. I compress my images when i put them on site. If possible, I keep product images under 50k, unless quality is too degraded. I find that a between a 5 and 7 quality on a jpeg is more than sufficient most of the time.
I compress my images also and am not sure my test was valid for I did not compress my slices thinking original image was already compressed. I should start with an uncompressed image, check load time on it; then slice and compare load time. Shannon