More thumbnail gallery questions

[Beaux]

Ok I've found some software that will create thumbnail galleries for me. I'm going to be putting a ton of pictures in these galleries and I obviously want to make it fast and pleasant even for the dial up guests but I also want to keep my bandwidth usage low. Now I've got some more technical questions.

1)I can build the galleries so that once a user had clicked on a pic, they can then go forward or backwards thru the whole thumbnail gallery, however they will then have downloaded and viewed every single photo. What I'm wondering is, will I use more bandwith if the user goes "back" every time to the gallery index? I'm just not sure how to set this up or even if it matters.

2) About how many bytes or KB does a good, fast loading pic need to be? I'm on cable, so everything loads fast. I don't want it to take forever for my dial up guests?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

-Beaux

[scotttyz]

#2) really depends on the # of pics on the page. I like normal pages to load in under 15 second at 56K. The real number the the total KB of the page, any extrernal files(.js .css, etc) and all pictures

#1) you can tell a browser in meta tags how long to cache the page, image etc. but this setting can easily be overridden by the end users 1)cache size limitations 2)and the option they have set for "used stored web pages".

The browser should look at the file name, request the file information, if the mod date matches the browser should not download the entire file (as I understand it)


Hope this was clear as mud :eek:

[djwixx]

If your looking to build thumbnail galleries the best software I've found to do it is Thumbs Plus, www.cerious.com. It will let you customise the number of thumbs on the page, colour etc. then you can some some minor 'tweaking' to get things to look the way you want.

With regard to file sizes, obviously the smaller the better for downloading. A lot a people tend to look at file size, i.e. 800x600 then consider whether it needs to be resized to reduce the size. You can maintain the file size but reduce the quality of a JPEG. Reducing the quality won't necessarily affect what people see but will reduce the file size dramatically. Most photo apps will allow you to save a JPEG with a % quality. A lot of digital cameras use 96%, but if you saved the file at 75%, basic browser viewing quality is hardly effected by the file size would be less than half.

If your still worried about file sizes use this link to get an idea who long your page/pics will load on whatever speed connection.
http://www.onlineconversion.com/downloadspeed.htm
i.e. a 200k image will take 29 seconds to load at 56K!!