Image URL vs Image Upload performance

Hey guys! I have a question. Do you know if the Coda tables perform better with images provided from URLs or images uploaded directly to the cells?

I want to know about it because I am working with a table with more than 2.000 rows and all the rows have images on it. I think the images are affecting the performance, so I need the best way to keep the image loading as fast as possible.

Fantastic question - IM asking myself the same thing. I got some brief word from a Coda performance dev and he mentioned:

“Content is indirected to via URLs so doc load won’t be affected but time to display would be much like a website with lots of images.”

AND

probably better if its us hosting though due to how we cache etc

My guess is that you should upload the images themself rather than referencing a hosted URL external to your doc. But Im opening to being corrected as I really want to know this answer

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Here’s a conceptual answer.

Images pasted as URLs → loaded from those URLs. How fast they load depends on how fast those servers will serve the images. The images will be served as is, no extra optimizations. I.e. if you’re linking to a 20 megapixel 8 MB photo, that’s what your browser tab will load.

Images uploaded to Coda → will be served through imgix (more on that read here). Imgix is a pretty fast CDN, and the pictures will be served in an optimized and compressed way, so a couple of KBs each regardless of what you uploaded to Coda.

In both cases the images load lazily, i.e. only when a row enters the view when you scroll. So you’ll still experience the same lags and row heights jumping around when you scroll regardless of what method you choose. Uploaded images could be easier on memory use though because of optimizations that linked images don’t have, so scrolling could be a bit smoother.

Neither method affects doc size significantly, but uploaded files will count towards the 1G/5G per doc quota on Free/Pro plans respectively.

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This helps a lot Paul, thanks! One of my concerns about this is because I am using the cards view, which preloads a massive part of the database (with images) from start. What is happening is that my cards view page takes a huge time to open in first place. Table view is not a problem since it loads just what is on screen, but cards view has this different behavior making the operation very very slow.

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i had not realized that card views did not have lazy loading. i was considering using this in a document.

now i know the performance cost

thanks for pointing this out

max

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So, just to keep you guys updated. Looks like URL images are waaay more perfomant than uploaded images on Cards view. One of the reasons I believe is that on URL the images load partially on beggining and looks like the Uploaded ones try to load all the same time.

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