Yes, I’m making a photo gallery like everyone else. I’m making it so people can order pics from the site. There are going to be about 500 photos per album in 5 different categories. The photos can be shrunk down to about 60kb a piece. If I use the actual pictures as thumbnails, just scaled down, the total size of all the pics will be about 30mb. I know this is a lot.
Either way, the people looking at the album will most likely look at nearly all the pics so they will be using up bandwidth either way. Plus, if I use the actual pics as thumbs the user will not have to wait to see actual pic when it’s clicked on because it’s already loaded. A preloader is annoying to me. I do realize a preloader would be wise when loading the thumbs. Just dislike them after you click one for the big picture.
So is using shrunken thumbs a necessity or if the big pic is under a certain size it shouldn’t matter if I use it for a thumb also?
Thanks for any experience input.