Images sizes & popouts

[cnh]

Greetings.

I have a site for sailors which is a guide to various harbours. This includes a lot of photographs. To make them large enough to be of any use, they take up a lot of space. I was thinking of using quite small images, which, when clicked on, open out in a new popout window.

There are two ways of doing this:

1. Thumbnail on page and large image for the pop out - therefore two images on the server.

2. Use just the large image but set the height/width attributes in the img tag to half or a third of the true value. Thus only one image needed on the server.

I'm tending towards (2). Any comments or feelings?

[tracknut]

#1 is the best way to do this. If you use option #2, the full images are downloaded to the browser, and then resized smaller for thumbnail display, which doesn't save any bandwidth or time on the user's part. Definitely don't go that route, especially since you say the photos are very large.

Dave

[thedancer]

Definitely number 1. Doing it the other way would cause it to be unnecessarily slow and make the images look rubbish as the rendering of squahed images within browsers is not as good as you get in a graphics program.