Are thumbnails needed anymore

[Cool&Awesome]

Hi guys,

Ok, call me lazy, or call me busy, but what's your opinion on this:

Does it make sense using resized original images instead of thumbnails?

Today's internet is pretty fast,and i've just done an image intensive website,
so i'm thinking on applying this solution to an image intensive site. As it
is now (development version) it loads in 7 seconds the first time (a page full
of images).

I've superoptimized every other aspect of the website, caching, scritps unified&minfied etc.

[mschroeder]

In my opinion there are several reasons to use thumbnails over full sized images.

For starters the web is fast and your connection might be fast but there are still plenty of people who do not have fast connections.

Second, since in a default state browsers only allow you to load a few requests in parallel. So unless you're serving your images from multiple sub-domains one long loading image can holdup the entire page load.

Third, if you're loading a bunch of large images you're consuming bandwidth for each page load. Potentially a lot of bandwidth for each page load when a user may only look at a page of thumbnails and close it.

Fourth, even for thousands of images it takes minutes to create thumbnails, there are desktop apps, command line tools, and even php that can automate the process.

Just my $0.02

[Cool&Awesome]

Thanks very much, i knew it was too easy to be truth, and this was very valuable answer to me.

Getting those thumbs done right now.