Image attachments are slooooww

[Majeed Badizadegan]

It's been a nice thing for some people to attach images directly through the site. It probably helps save some the confusion of image hosting and such. Unfortunately, it can be very slow and cumbersome depending on the size of the image. I have a 16MB connection-- everything on the site is snappy except direct attachments.. Pictures from FlickR, photobucket, ImageShack, etc. show up instantly at decent sized resolutions within the thread.

I ran some quick tests for loading times:

Browser: Chrome
Thread 1
image size 3872x2592 5.5 seconds initial load time 4.5 seconds between images.

Thread 2
image size 3871x2591 5.3 initial load time, 5.6 seconds between images 3701x2488, 5.1 seconds between images 2591x3871

Thread 3
Load times are not much improved for smaller images:
image size 553x800 2.8 seconds initial load time, 3.2 seconds between images 653x800

It looks like the full sized file is being loaded in the preview in the small view upon the initial click. By clicking again on the picture, you get the image to display in the browser at its full resolution.

The attachment system is overall a bit sluggish. My suggestions:

1. The best solution would be to do away with the current clickable thumbnail and replace it with a clickable intermediate sized image for web viewing (say, at the maximum viewing resolution the site allows). The pictures would show up just as pictures from hosting websites do (photobucket, FlickR, etc.). This will help with continuity, ease of use, viewability etc. across the site. It seems like the downsizing/compression algorithms are best with FlickR for sharpness, so possibly use something like that for the resizing...
2. If the small thumbnails must stay, Create an intermediate file generated at 1024x768, such as FlickR does, to speed up the initial loading. Obviously thumbnails sized images are generated in the thread itself, but no intermediate size is created to fetch for snappier web viewing.

Thoughts?