Updating failed – Can a gallery be too big?

Hello Evane,

While the plugin doesn’t have a limitation to the amount of images you can add to a gallery, 700 images is quite large and you’re likely running out of resources on your server.

So Envira isn’t choking due to the number of images, but your server itself is unable to handle the request.

I suggest trying to approach this differently and avoid using a gallery with that many images. It’s likely that you’ll always run into issues, regardless of which gallery plugin you’re using.

Perhaps break the images up and have 10 galleries with 70 images on different pages.

Does that sound like an option that will work for you?

It’s not ideal, but if that’s the only way I suppose I could make it work. But the problem wasn’t with the opening of the webpage itself, it was a problem updating the page once I added the gallery. I wouldn’t think that THAT would take so many resources. But I’m a newb at this so perhaps I’m mistaken.

As for the gallery on the page, I’ve enabled lazy loading so that should speed things up, in the pro version of the plugin I see something about pagination. Would this allow me to do an infinite scroll of the gallery? So the other images wouldn’t be shown onto the page until I started scrolling down? How would the load time of infinitely scrolling pagination compare to the lazy loading?

Hey Evan,

Sorry for the delay. Pagination would allow you to break your gallery into multiple pages.

Combining lazy-load with the large gallery would give you a infinite scroll effect though. Which in theory should work just fine, but you do run the risk of the aforementioned page load issues with a huge gallery like that.

You also want to consider users and their experience when visiting your site. When you go to a site’s gallery, are you likely to scroll through a gallery of 700 photos to find the one that you’re looking for? I know that I personally get bored with sites that are setup with scrolling, then loading, then scrolling, then loading, and I soon find myself leaving the page before viewing all the images.

In my experience, 700 photos is just too many and I would rather focus on ways to break that gallery up categorically to make it easier for my site visitors to find what they want.

Just my 2 cents, but hopefully that makes sense and is helpful for you!