Question

I use Highslide jQuery Gallery to load albums and their thumbnails on a single page.
Users can click the thumbnail and each album then loads.

The website runs slow if I have more than 10 albums per page (due to loading thumbs and pics)
I use base64 encoding on the data in the database.

How can I load only the thumbails instead of whole albums?
The album will only load once the user has clicked the thumbnail..

<?php 

//vars
$albumsQuery = mysql_query("select * from albums");
$album_count = 0;
// start loop
while ($album = mysql_fetch_array($albumsQuery)) {
    $album_count++;
    $unserializePhotos  = unserialize(base64_decode($album['photos']));
    $unserializeDescriptions = unserialize(base64_decode($album['descriptions']));
    $firstPhoto = '';
    $first_photo_count = 0;
    foreach ($unserializePhotos as $k => $v) {
        if ($first_photo_count == 0) {
            $firstPhoto = $v['name'];
        }
        $first_photo_count++;
    }
    $first_desc_count = 0;
    foreach ($unserializeDescriptions as $k => $v) {
        $unserializeDescriptions[$k]=htmlspecialchars($v);
        if ($first_desc_count == 0) {
            $firstDesc = htmlspecialchars($v);
        }
    $first_desc_count++;
    }
?>

<div class="highslide-gallery">
<a class='highslide' id="thumb<?php echo $album_count; ?>" href='/albums/<?php echo $firstPhoto; ?>' onclick="return hs.expand(this, {slideshowGroup: <?php echo $album_count; ?>})">
    <img src='/albums/<?php echo $firstPhoto; ?>' height="100px" width="100px" />
</a>
<div class="hidden-container">
    <?php 
    $photoDescIndex = 0;
    foreach ($unserializePhotos as $k => $v) {
        if ($v['name'] != '' && $v['name'] != $firstPhoto){
    ?>
        <a class='highslide' href='/albums/<?php echo $v['name']; ?>'  onclick="return hs.expand(this, {slideshowGroup: <?php echo $album_count; ?>})">
            <img src='/albums/<?php echo $v['name']; ?>' />
        </a>
    <?php 
        }
    $photoDescIndex++;
    } 
    ?>
</div>

Answer 1

1. You are loading full image into thumbnail: <img src='/albums/<?php echo $firstPhoto; ?>' height="100px" width="100px" />. Browser requires more time to load big photo and even more time to resize it. You should prepare small 100×100 thumbnails on the server side.

2. You should not load all albums <div class="hidden-container">...</div> explicitly. Load content of selected album via AJAX on demand (when user clicked on thumbnail). Additionally you may start to pre-load albums in background after page loading.

3. Do not assign event handlers directly to each onclick="..." – use event delegation e.g.

   $("body").on("click", ".highslide", function() {
     var album_count = this.id.slice(5); // a id="thumb<?php echo $album_count; ?>"
     var target = $(this).next("div.hidden-container");
     // TODO: load album album_count into target via AJAX
     // TODO: after load: hs.expand(this, {slideshowGroup: album_count});
   });