A lot of images can take awhile to load. This is a fact of life, and there's little you can do about this. If you have a lot of images on your page, they can be frustrating to wait for. We've all sat there waiting for several minutes to see what a page will look like. It's not a fun experience.

However, there are two things you can do when you've got a large image or many small images. First you can specificy the exact image size (using the height= and width= tags within your image tag (be sure to actually place the pixel height and pixel width after those commands). What this means is that the page can become formatted before the images are loaded. This allows users to view the text on the page and read it while images are loading.

The other thing you can do is include a preloading image. That's a smaller, lower-resolution, image which loads into the image's space first, while loading the larger image (use the command lowsrc=imagelocation command within your image tag.) My artwork page uses both these things. It has fifteen small images, and a single large one, but it preloads a lower-resolution image before the larger one, and pre-sizes all the smaller images, so the entire table is laid out before most images load.

Another technique is to make gifs which are interlaced. The image linked here, for example, is around 40-50k, but because it's interlaced and presized, it begins to load almost immediately. That way the user at least has something to look at while waiting to load the page.

There are two remaining important things to remember about sizing images:
  • If you change an image in your page, don't forget to go into your code and change the size to match the new image.
  • Every monitor will display images differently.
There is no easy solution to the display problem. Large monitors will make small images appear to be miniscule, and small monitors will make large images look absolutely gigantic. Find a middle ground which works for you, but don't assume that just because an image looks good on your monitor that it will look good on anyone else's.