Show image placeholders

Random

In many threads there are loads of photos and sometimes these images take a long time to show. Is it possible to just show a default box or something for IMG tags while photos are loading etc?

thebman

I think this is more a browser setting that you should look for.

I think Opera does this by default. I'm guessing your trying to stop the image eventually loading and pushing everything down on the page while your reading a post further down that suddenly disappears?

Jonathan

Adding this to your userContent.css file will make image placeholders show up in Firefox.

@-moz-document url-prefix(http), url-prefix(file) {
  img:-moz-broken{
    -moz-force-broken-image-icon:1;
    width:24px;
    height:24px;
  }
}

Doesn't show them during loading though.

Ron DMC

I've noticed that IE6 has image placeholders all over the shop.

Not that I'd condone using IE6 for any reason whatsoever if given a choice.

Jonathan

Ron DMC wrote: »

I've noticed that IE6 has image placeholders all over the shop.

Not that I'd condone using IE6 for any reason whatsoever if given a choice.

You've one in your sig.

Some image on netsoc hosting.

People only notice them when they switch to the advanced editor.

Conor

Random wrote: »

In many threads there are loads of photos and sometimes these images take a long time to show. Is it possible to just show a default box or something for IMG tags while photos are loading etc?

To do that properly we'd need to know the size of the images. Since that information is not available to vBulletin for most images, there's no point showing a placeholder as the page will re-flow anyway once the image loads.

Random

Fair points lads. What about maybe even showing an icon to show an image is loading without even going into detail on the dimensions?

For example when youtube videos are loading and before you realise it's actually a youtube clip you get a white box.

What about a little icon to suggest there's a line of photos loading?

Conor

Random wrote: »

Fair points lads. What about maybe even showing an icon to show an image is loading without even going into detail on the dimensions?

Random wrote: »

What about a little icon to suggest there's a line of photos loading?

To do that on non-broken images would probably require some JavaScript. Personally, I don't think the very minor benefit of a notification of a partly-loaded image would outweigh the combined cost of developing that code and the performance penalty of adding yet more client-side scripting. There's somewhere in the region of 175k of JavaScript running at the moment and I'm hesitant to add more unless there's a definite benefit to it.

Random wrote: »

For example when youtube videos are loading and before you realise it's actually a youtube clip you get a white box.

That only works because the size of the YouTube clip is known beforehand.