There are several plugins for viewing interactive 360-spin images of products, such as this: https://www.ajax-zoom.com/index.php?cid=home&tag=spin360
However, my question is whether there are any current or proposed solutions for this that are browser-native, so don't require any plugins? One analogy would be how gifs are now natively supported by most browsers without the need for a plugin.
Many thanks!
First, it is important to differentiate between the common types of 360 spin:
Spin from images
Spin from 3D model
You are asking about a spin from a set of images (photos). There is no native file format for 360 spins generated from a series of images. The spinning effect is achieved with JavaScript and browsers don't have the capability to display these animations natively.
The closest you can get is what Sirv does, to generate a .spin file, which can be viewed as a standalone URL like this:
https://demo.sirv.com/example.spin
However, it is rendered as an HTML file and in the background it still serves up all the unique images and JavaScript required to create the spinning effect. That file cannot be embedded in a page like native files (e.g. images or videos) with an img or other tag - it still need the .js to be embedded in the page too, like this:
<script src="https://scripts.sirv.com/sirv.js"></script>
<div class="Sirv" data-src="https://demo.sirv.com/example.spin"></div>
If instead you wanted to embed a 3D model, then yes, WebGL is the browser-native solution.
I have a web page with around 70 images. I am looking for a way to bundle these images into a resource file. This isn't to improve client side performance as caching etc will take care of this. It's more for asset management on the sever side via our cms - I'd like to be able to deploy a single resource into the cms rather than having to create 70 individual resources.
Are there JavaScript libraries that will let me bundle images?
It is easy to do that using Image Sprites and you need not use JavaScript. A Sprite is a single image file with a collection of images positioned in it at specific locations. I recommend to use a transparent PNG image with your images in it.
Below you can see transparent PNG sprites used by Google, Windows Live and Facebook.
Once the sprite is loaded in web page, it is easy to display images in another page since the browser normally caches images to improve page loading speed. You can display specific image in a sprite by defining it's specific location in the sprite using CSS, like;
#prev{left:63px;width:43px;}
#prev{background:url('img_navsprites.gif') -47px 0;}
#next{left:129px;width:43px;}
#next{background:url('img_navsprites.gif') -91px 0;}
Finally, Spritebox is a handy tool to create your own custom image sprites.
I think what you need is CSS sprite.
Using CSS sprite you can have more than one image in a single image and use that image to show individual image as your requirement.
The main advantage of this is that you need single request for this image instead of request for for each images.
For knowing more about CSS Sprite check below link
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_image_sprites.asp
For those unaware of TimThumb, it will take any image, of any size or dimension and create a thumbnail on the fly to any desired size. The beauty of it is that it really works on any dimension you feed it through a combination of either resizing the image, cropping or zoom cropping the image.
Ive been searching for jscript equvalents but they either require the user to actually mask out the thumbs manually (looking for a script that automatically does it to images) or the scripts can't handle images in a different aspect ratio.
Thanks for any leads on this!
It is impossible to do this only with client-side javascript. PHP has GD, ImageMagick libraries which create the new image (actual thumbnail) and javascript alone can't do this, as it is client side script, it can't create files.
So the answer is: There is no any.
As #papirtiger pointed out you can still do it with server-side javascript (such as node.js).
Please see this link
It depends.
You can use CSS or Javascript for simple image scaling.
There are tons of available plugins to this.
I doubt that there is one that does the guesstimation exactly the same as timthumb.
If you are going resize a large amount images on the page it will really hurt performance.
Another alternative is to several fixed size "layouts" (960, 320) etc and have the server generate thumbs for each.
You can than use javascript to load the appriate size.
If you really need to rescale the file:
Use external webservice to resize the image.
Most of them take a url and return a resized image:
example.com/resize?image="http://example.com/image1.jpg"&height="...
If you have TimThumb running on your server you can set up a simple API to allow you to call your own service.
othrwise see Image resizing web service for a few alternatives.
I am going to have a lot of images and trying to find the most efficient way of storing these images to keep the page snappy.
So far I have thought of just the two ways: load with javascript eg picture = new Image(); picture.src = "file.jpg"; and append / remove to the page as necessary, or load into <img> and set display:none.
Are there other options? what is considered the best way to do this?
The best way for a photo gallery (if thats what you are building) is usually to have several sizes of the images, at least two:
a smallish size that is highly compressed and thus have a small footprint: this is the image you load into grids and display in a page where there are multiple images
a larger image with lower compression and higher image quality - this is the one you show when people want to see details.
Since people most often come to the detailed image from a page where the small/fast loading version has already been shown, and thus is already in the browsers cache, you do a little trick and have instant photos, without preloading anything.
It goes like this:
On the details page you show the highly compressed small image in an image tag that has the dimension of the larger detailed version. You then load the larger detailed version in the background using new Image() with an onload event attached that changes the source of the image tag with the small compressed version to the large detailed version.
It looks great, works fast and users will love you ;)
PS: the best way to store images is the browsers cache, not js or the DOM, so if you truly wish to preload images, which is generally a bad practice (tho it can be necessary sometimes), make the browser fetch them for you in the background by including a css file that references them in styles that aren't applied to visual areas of your site.
I'm not sure about "efficient", but the most logical way would be not use the JavaScript to load an image (useless if you have JavaScript disabled) or to set the image as hidden via the display property (likewise, and the browser will probably just load the image anyway).
As such, a sensible suggestion would be to use boring old paging and display 'n' images per page. However, to bring this up to date, you could use "lazy" (a.k.a. "deferred") loading and load additional page content via Ajax as the user scrolls. However, it's key that this gracefully degrades into the standard "paged" behaviour if JavaScript is disabled, etc.
The perfect example of this in operation is Google's image search, and if you search here on StackOverflow you see a discussion of possible implementations, etc.
It's better to use javascript the way that you have it and then add it to the DOM as you need, as opposed to first adding it to the to the DOM and then hiding it because DOM manipulation is much slower and you may not use some images
UPDATE: This question is outdated, please disregard
So.. my idea is to load a full manga/comics at once, with a progress bar included, and make sort of a stream, like:
My page loads the basic (HTML+CSS+JS) (of course)
As done, I start loading the imgs(the URLs are stored on JS var) from my server, one a time (or some faster way) so I can make a sort of progress bar.
ALTERNATIVE: Is there a way to load a compresses file with all imgs and uncompress at the browser?
ALTERNATIVE: I was also thinking of saving then as strings and then decode, they are mostly .jpg
The images don't have to show right away, i just need the callback when they are done.
XTML and HTML5 is acceptable
What is the fastest way to load a series of images for my website?
EDIT
Since #Oded comment.. the question is truly what is the best tech for loading images and the user don't have to wait everytime is turns the 'page'. Targeting a more similar experience like when you read comics in real life.
EDIT2
As some people helped me realize, I'm looking for a pre-loader on steroids
EDIT3
No css techs will do
If you split large images into smaller parts, they'll load faster on modern browsers due to pipelining.
ALTERNATIVE: Is there a way to load a compresses file with all imgs and uncompress at the browser?
Image formats are already compressed. You would gain nothing by stitching and trying to further compress them.
You can just stick the images together and use background-position to display different parts of them: this is called ‘spriting’. But spriting's mostly useful for smaller images, to cut down the number of HTTP requests to the server and somewhat reduce latency; for larger images like manga pages the benefit is not so large, possibly outweighed by the need to fetch one giant image all at once even if the user is only going to read the first few pages.
ALTERNATIVE: I was also thinking of saving then as strings and then decode
What would that achieve? Transferring as string would, in most cases, be considerably slower than raw binary. Then to get them from JavaScript strings into images you'd have to use data: URLs, which don't work in IE6-IE7, and are limited to how much data you can put in them. Again, this is meant primarily for small images.
I think all you really want is a bog-standard image preloader.
You could preload the images in javascript using:
var x = new Image();
x.src = "someurl";
This would work like the one you described as "saving the image in strings".
Spriting
Just have a look how facebook does it: http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/z3JQK/hash/11cngjg0.png
One image that loads FASTER than series of small images. To display the icon you simply create a div with fixed dimensions, and move the background inside it. Your div works as a viewport for the big image. You use background-position to move to appropriate part of the image. Everything else is hidden.
Different domains
Something you probably didn't know - Internet Explorer has a limit of connections per server. You can read about it here: http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;183110&x=17&y=11 (here are exact numbers).
What it means - if user is using IE7, he will be able to load ONLY 4 (or 2) files at the same time from your server regardless his internet connection speed.
To speed things up, you could create few subdomains: server1.mydomain.com, server2.mydomain.com, server3.mydomain.com etc - and then user can download many files a lot quicker, because you use different hosts to serve different files.
As done, I start loading the imgs(the
URLs are stored on JS var) from my
server, one a time (or some faster
way) so I can make a sort of progress
bar.
Your browser already downloads the HTML first, that's how it knows to load any JS/images you reference. You are trying to invent something that already exists.
Just make sure your manga is made up of lots of images of a known size, which you specify in your img tags. Most browsers have some sort of progress bar to show that it's loading resources for you. You're not going to make loading large images faster unless you improve either the speed at which your server serves them, or your user's internet connection, or you compress them to make your image files smaller (likely at the cost of image quality).
Note: JPG and PNG are already compressed.
You can try using a "CSS sprites" technique. Basically the idea is you use your favorite image editing program to stich all your images into a single image. It's faster to send this because you lose the per/file overhead in terms of encoding the image and sending the image. On the client side you use CSS to only select the portion of the total image that is used in any one place.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites/
http://www.fiftyfoureleven.com/weblog/web-development/css/css-sprites-images-optimization
AND/OR
You can use lazy loading to only load images when they come into view.
http://www.appelsiini.net/projects/lazyload
Image preloaders have been around for ages. You really do not need to load them all at once, you can do it on demand [when the person loads the next page, you can fetch the image after it]
My page loads the basic (HTML+CSS+JS) (of course)
As done, I start loading the imgs(the URLs are stored on JS var) from my
server, one a time (or some faster way) so I can make a sort of progress bar.
The images don't have to show right away, i just need the callback
when they are done.
If you want to load 10 images as fast as possible, place 10 <img> tags on the page, one for each image. Use Javascript to hide all the but the currently viewed image; add next/back links that use JS to hide the current image and show the next one. Many browser already have some form of progress bar, and by doing things with regular old HTML, it will function correctly.
You're trying to re-invent all this functionality with Javascript for no good reason. You're not going to do it better than the browser.
All that said, this is probably a bad idea. You might dump 15MB of comic pages into the browser window only to have the user leave after reading the first page. Rather than trying to pre-load all images, you should use JS to always keep the next page (or two) pre-loaded, not the entire thing.
Here's something you can try, which by happenstance I just coded up:
(function() {
var imgs = [ "image1.png", "image2.png", ... /* all your image names */ ],
index = 0,
img;
function loader() {
if (index >= imgs.length) return;
(img = new Image()).onload = loader;
setTimeout(function() { img.src = "/path/to/images/" + imgs[index++]; }, 1);
}
loader();
})();
Plop all your image names (or the ones you want to preload) into the array, and make sure this script starts up when your page(s) start loading. It'll work its way through the list of images, loading them, and then moving on to the next one when each image finishes. (The setTimeout call is to make sure that the "onload" handler doesn't get called while you're still inside a handler.)
You'd probably want to do this for lots of the "nuts and bolts" images for your whole site - in other words, each page would try to load images for everything. Once they're in the cache, of course, this won't take a significant amount of time. Alternatively, you could run this script only on a couple pages, like "login" screens and the main "home" page. Of course, if you've got a site like Flickr, then you probably wouldn't want to preload all your images :-)