Mimicking Facebook’s low-res placeholder / preview images in WP?

Hi folks,

Preface – this is what I’m on about:
https://code.facebook.com/posts/991252547593574/the-technology-behind-preview-photos/

I came across the above post from Facebook Engineering sometime back and it has stuck in my mind as an impressive piece of optimisation. Basically, on slow connections and I think in the FB Lite app, Facebook devised a method of efficiently displaying a very low-res “frosted preview” of an image in place of the actual image – which would download in due course. This type of progressive-loading technique (is that an appropriate term?) isn’t new and it’s not a FB invention. Their implementation focuses more on getting that low-res preview squeezed into a 200 byte server response, the first of 2 server calls to get the URL of the actual full-size image

Anyways, what I’m interested in is the display side of things… not hacking tiny images into server responses! I think the idea is cool whereby when a page loads, very low-res, scaled images are quickly returned in place of the actual images which would be loaded shortly thereafter

I’ve had a browse around various plugins and while many offer lazy-loading (calling an image only when it is in the viewport) – I can’t see anything that meets what I’ve described above. I thought I’d post here to see if anyone has done similar, perhaps knows a plugin to do this or can give more insight into whether this is possible or not

Being honest, this is being perhaps overly anal about optimization so it’s more the idea that interests me and it’s not a requirement for any project I’m working on

Thx,

C

• This topic was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by _.
• This topic was modified 8 years, 2 months ago by Jan Dembowski.