Setting to turn off thumbnail images in post listings?

[Matt Bacon]

Is there a setting I can use to turn off thumbnail images in index pages, so I only have to load the pictures if I go into the original post? Loading 50 thumbnails into the same post preview  takes an age and stops me navigating the index until they’ve all loaded…

best,

M.

[Xingu]

I couldn't find one on the user level. Not sure if there is one on the server side. If there is, I would think it is global and would be in place for everyone. Dave may have some more insight on this.

[Matt Bacon]

I finally figured out where I need to look, and:

This is a chunk of the "view new posts since my last visit" listing. You can see the "thumbnails" that are displayed in the page body for this post. Looking in the Network tab of the Web Developer Tools in my browser, every one of those 12 pictures is between 450 and 600K, which means just to render those images is taking 3MB of download.... and more importantly for you guys, @Xingu and @Dave Ambrose, 3MB of outbound bandwidth on your server plan. And I may not even want to read that thread. Looking in the console, some images used this way genuinely are thumbnails at 10-12K each, others are clearly the full size images. I can't see any rhyme or reason to it: it doesn't seem that it's only images hosted locally on modelcarsmag..com that end up full size, or ones that aren't that do. Anyway, I think it would improve performance for all of us, and save you money, if it was possible to find out why some "thumbnails" are full size image files and and put a stop to it!

All the best,

M.

 

[Xingu]

I flagged this for Dave to look at.

[Dave Ambrose]

Thanks for taking notice.

We are aware of this. Some years back, we started allowing higher resolution pictures on the forum. It means people can post pictures without resizing them, and we can zoom in to our heart's content. We also can use the pictures in our Forum Finds column. Our hosting plan gives us a massive amount of outbound bandwidth, so that isn't likely to be a problem. It does slow down page load times, but at this point, it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff. 

Unfortunately, our forum software doesn't allow for downsizing the images on the fly. We're not the only ones in this situation, so perhaps they'll implement it in a future release.