Question

I’m designing a small portfolio website for my friend and I am having difficulty trying to get the fadeIn + fadeOut effect to work properly. The images are sliding + fading, however, there is a long delay in between the fades and you can momentarily see the background. The slider I am using is based off of the following tutorial:

http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/automatic-image-slider-w-css-jquery/

The only changes I have done to the original code is to add a caption to the images and (trying to add) a fade effect when the images slide.

Javascript

$(".image_reel").fadeIn(500).delay(0).fadeOut(500);
    $(".image_reel").animate({
        left: -image_reelPosition
    }, 500);
    $(".image_reel").delay(0).fadeIn(500);

The code here can be found in the rotate function on the tutorial website.

So, as I stated above the code here is successfully fading and sliding the images, however, there is a delay where you can momentarily see the background.

Any help would greatly be appreciating as to how I can get one image to fade out while the other image is fading in at the same time.

Answer 1

what i’ve done in the past is have two div’s that overlap, and alternate fadein/fadeout, dynamically loading the next image in the div that is currently invisible.

Here is the code i used to accomplish it:

var FeatureRotator = (function($,global) {
    var self = {},
        currentFeature = 0,
        images = [],
        imageData = [],
        imagePrefix = "/images/",
        timer = null,        
        totalImages = 0,
        initialFeature = 0,
        interval,
        blendSpeed;


    function setVisibleImage(iid) {
        $("#img1").attr('src',images[iid].src).css('opacity',1);
        $("#img2").css('opacity',0);
        $(".active").removeClass("active");
        $("#f"+iid).addClass("active");
    }

    function setCurrentImage(id) {
        currentFeature = id;
        setVisibleImage(id);
    }

    function doHoverIn(obj) {
        var position = global.parseInt(obj.target.attributes.position.value,10);

        if (currentFeature === position) {
            self.pause();
        } else {
            setCurrentImage(global.parseInt(position, 10));
            self.pause();
        }
    }

    function doHoverOut() {
        self.unpause();
    }

    self.init = function(options,callback) {
        var i = 0,
            tempImg = null,
            element = null,
            img1 = null,
            img2 = null;

        interval = options.interval || 5000;
        blendSpeed = options.blendSpeed || 500;
        element = options.element;
        initialFeature = options.initialFeature || 0;
        imagePrefix = options.imagePrefix;
        imageData = options.imageData || [];
        img1 = $("<img/>").attr('id','img1').css('cursor','pointer');
        img2 = $("<img/>").attr('id','img2').css('cursor','pointer').css('opacity','0').css('margin-top',-options.height);
        img1.click(function() {
            window.location = imageData[currentFeature].link;
        });
        img2.click(function() {
            window.location = imageData[currentFeature].link;
        });
        $(element).append(img1).append(img2);

        totalImages = imageData.length; //2;//$(".feature").size();

        for (i = 0;i < totalImages; i++) {
            tempImg = new global.Image();
            tempImg.src = imagePrefix + imageData[i].image;            //"feature_" + i + ".png";
            images.push(tempImg);


            $("#f"+i).css('background-image','url("'+imagePrefix+"feature_"+i+"_thumb.png"+'")')
                     .hover(doHoverIn, doHoverOut)
                     .attr('position',i);
        }

        setVisibleImage(initialFeature);

        if (options.autoStart) {
            self.start();
        }
        if (typeof callback === "function") {
            callback();
        }
    };

    function updateImage() {        
        var active = global.parseInt($("#img1").css('opacity'),10) === 1 ? "#img1" : "#img2",
            nextFeature = (currentFeature === totalImages-1 ? 0 : currentFeature+1);

        if (active === "#img1") {
            $("#img2").attr('src',images[nextFeature].src);

            $("#img2").fadeTo(blendSpeed, 1);            
            $("#img1").fadeTo(blendSpeed, 0);
        } else {
            $("#img1").attr('src',images[nextFeature].src);            
            $("#img1").fadeTo(blendSpeed, 1);            
            $("#img2").fadeTo(blendSpeed, 0);
        }

        $("#f"+currentFeature).removeClass("active");
        $("#f"+nextFeature).addClass("active");

        currentFeature = nextFeature;
    }



    self.start = function() {
        currentFeature = initialFeature;
        setVisibleImage(currentFeature);
        timer = global.setInterval(function(){
            updateImage();
        }, interval);
    };

    self.stop = function() {
        global.clearTimeout(timer);
    };

    self.pause = function() {
        global.clearTimeout(timer);
    };

    self.unpause = function() {
        timer = global.setInterval(function(){
            updateImage();
        }, interval);
    };


    return self;
}(this.jQuery, this));

Note that there is a bit more required to make this work as is. The main part of interest to you would be updateImage()