In honor of my 1,800th day as an Oregon resident, I went through all of my old photo albums, looking for panoramas that I hadn't yet put into the high-definition panorama viewer. Along the way, I remembered that most of the panoramas stitched prior to 2007 weren't in great shape (poor stitching software, white balance problems, inability of the 32-bit Windows stitching software that I used prior to hugin to process > 3GB photos, etc.). When all was done, I had rebuilt a few dozen panoramas and imported the stragglers into the viewer. Just for kicks, I added a preview mode to the viewer; click "See All" and it will load a (currently 9MB) thumbnail catalog of ever picture visible through the viewer.
Today I installed Google Page Speed (offsite) to see if I could make my site load faster. Sure enough, it had a few suggestions that I've implemented. The first is that the image tiles in the panorama viewer are now served from separate hosts, which eliminates the initial lag when a panorama has just begun to load. It also provides a few more lanes (12 on Firefox) of download to the browser, which shortens download queue depths and (hopefully) makes better use of internet bandwidth. The second improvement is that thumbnails in the photo albums are now saved at 90% quality instead of 100%, which shrank the files by about a third. The third improvement also applies to the thumbnails--I now run jpegoptim(1) on them, which removes EXIF data and optimizes the Huffman tables. This further shrinks the thumbnails to a third of the size that they were before. The fourth improvement was to reduce the quality of the panorama preview images to 75%, which cut the download size in half. Hope you enjoy the performance enhancements!
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