Topic with many pictures difficult to read

One thread that i really like is this one. I like it especially because of the many beautifull pictures. When i open it however, it takes really long to scroll to the recent posts, because all the pictures have to load first. Is there a way to circumvent this problem? Can i alter the number of posts on one screen? Thanks in advance for any help.

I'd also be interested in how to block previously viewed pictures. Not having easy access to highspeed internet, loading pictures can be quite time consuming. As a result, I seldom view long threads containing lots of interesting pictures. And I seldom have the opportunity to view new pictures being added to a long thread simply because I'd have to reload all the previous already viewed pictures before I could see the new ones. I know that most people have high speed internet, but that's not the case for us rural homesteader types....the very people interested in permaculture. Perhaps there's a way to load just thumbnails, then click on the thumbnail to open the fill picture? Just a thought.

For now I have to wait until I get to a town that has high speed internet that I can access without it costing me an arm and a leg.

I think this would be a really useful option! I have only 5GB of data per month, and then it goes to dial-up. I'll often back out of a thread if it has too many pictures because I don't want it using up all my data...or because my data is gone and the page just never loads.

Sometimes. I can click the X on my browser and get it to stop loading pages, and sometimes I can see a little icon where the picture is supposed to be, and I can right-click on that and "open image in a new tab." This allows me to just look at one image.

I LOVE picture-heavy threads, but, it would be fantastic to be able to only load some of the picture, not the one's I've already seen.

Sounds like a good PIE feature you could enable or disable to your liking. I myself like having the photos show without having to click on anything.

Something that might work for both parties would be a lazy load feature. Anybody familiar with lazy load?
Lazy load only loads what you can see on the screen. When you scroll down it loads the rest. This could also do away with pagination (when you have to click for the next page of the thread).

There's a PIE feature that takes you to the last post you read in the thread.  You can activate it in your profile.  Would this help a little?

I like the idea of PIE feature for people who have slow or limited internet to not load photos. Maybe the photo doesn't load but where the photo is, it has the name of the photo and a button to 'see this photo'.  

r ranson wrote:There's a PIE feature that takes you to the last post you read in the thread.  You can activate it in your profile.  Would this help a little?

When you activate the email notification, it does the same thing. The link takes you to the last post in the thread. You still have to wait untill all the pictures are loaded, though. On my computer this is a minor problem, because once all the pichtures are in the cache, the next time it will be faster. But on my phone it is a real PITA.

Philipp Mueller wrote:

r ranson wrote:There's a PIE feature that takes you to the last post you read in the thread.  You can activate it in your profile.  Would this help a little?

When you activate the email notification, it does the same thing. The link takes you to the last post in the thread. You still have to wait untill all the pictures are loaded, though. On my computer this is a minor problem, because once all the pichtures are in the cache, the next time it will be faster. But on my phone it is a real PITA.

There are certain picture/video heavy threads that I don't open any more also.  One of my favorites...the music thread   and I loved the garden pic one...

For some, that aren't so big though, I find that once it starts opening if I click on 'end' it seems to speed up all of that loading and jumps to the 'end'....not sure what happens but suddenly it's all there and I can scroll back up to find stuff or even go back up using 'home' and the photos are there.

This is on a pc in firefox...have never used a phone for the internet.

Philipp Mueller wrote:One thread that i really like is this one.

Hey that's mine! :D
Thank you Philipp :)

Su Ba wrote:I'd also be interested in how to block previously viewed pictures. Not having easy access to highspeed internet, loading pictures can be quite time consuming. As a result, I seldom view long threads containing lots of interesting pictures.  

I have to admit that I don't visit other people's project threads that much either. Like Joseph Lofthouse's garden, his is huge!!

I have high speed internet and no data cap and my thread still sucks. My first intent was a bit selfish, I wanted to take notes about my garden and permies is free hosting. I figured that if I got good feedback then it was ok to continue.
Now the garden has almost 28000 views and the feedback I got here took me by surprise. It's easier for me to post pictures than to write about them. Every time I add to my thread I know I make things worse.

There are other problems with media heavy threads. The text will load first and then the scroll bar will jump around as the images load and posts resize themselves.
I though about adding a table of content on the first post to aid navigation but that made me realize that basically I'm trying to fit a blog into a thread.

I was hopping that eventually my thread would be split in several pages but I think that the number of pages depends on the number of posts and not length.
So maybe having 2-3 images per post would be better because the thread would be split sooner, although this is still trying to fit a blog into a thread.

Fixing this through PIE would suck for all the non PIE people no? Assuming that more content pulls more new people in here making this a PIE feature would be like preaching to the choir.

I have been to other forums where community members could start blogs. These were usually accessible from the user profile and in the user signature if they chose to put a link there. That would be nice!

One thing you can do on your own posts/threads to speed up load times for everyone is to make the picture smaller. There's actually a spiffy nifty bit of code you can stick at the end of image url (this doesn't work with attached images, but it works with embedded ones.)

Usually when you post a picture, the url looks like [img]https://picture.com/picture.jpg[/img]

If you put a space after the url and then write "width=500" it'll make the picture 500 pixels wide. The default width of pictures on pernies is something like 700 pixels. I find 500 is a good width for a lot of pictures. (If someone clicks on the image, it'll open up in a new window as the full size). Here's what the code looks like [img]https://picture.com/picture.jpg width=500[/img]. Another size I frequently use is 300 pixels. T His makes a picture big enough to see all the details, but not so big it takes up the whole screen.

You could make it even smaller. A little thumbnail would be maybe 100 or 200 pixels wide. The code would look like [img]https://picture.com/picture.jpg width=100[/img] or [img]https://picture.com/picture.jpg width=200[/img] I usually use 150 pixels for thumbnails. You can totally experiment!


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Of course, you can only use this bit of code when you're embedding the pictures. BUT, you can get around that. If you have a PIE account or are a Pollinator, you can start a thread in one of the Private forums and attach your pictures THERE (one picture per thread to make them load easier for you, or space a ton of posts between each picture-heavy post). A lot of us staff actually have picture-dump threads to store our pictures so that we can embed them and make our threads looks spiffy. Peal Sutton has one such picture-dump/storage thread in the Pollinator forum.

If you don't have PIE or Pollinator status, and you want to shrink a post that you attached, you can "report" your post and ask a moderator to make the pictures 500 or 300 or whatever pixels wide. We have a spiffy button that can resize even attached pictures.

Here's some examples:

Full size


500 pixels


300 pixels


150 pixels


50 pixels

I use imgur to host my pictures. All of them are resized to 700 pixels wide before uploading. I downloaded my thread on my machine and that's almost 28 MB of data. Lots of wasted bandwidth if you only want the last post.

If the width is changed in the forum img tag will the server send only the thumbnail or does it send the full image and it's the browser's job to resize?



Edit:
The original image above is 1129 pixels wide and 259kB. It was uploaded on imgur and embedded here using width=75 in the tags.
The image I got by saving this thread in my browser is 1129 pixels wide and 102.7kB, the same image size as the original image but a smaller file  (seems imgur does compression).
Using GIMP to resize the original image to 75 pixels wide will give me a 9.7kB file. JPEG compression quality can change the file size a lot. In this case it was set to 95%.