Thread:The S/@comment-995426-20151012214406

I've observed that some gallery pages can get...very, very large. For example, the gallery pages for each of the four main 2K12 turtle characters: Leonardo (2012 TV series)/Gallery, Donatello (2012 TV series)/Gallery, Raphael (2012 TV series)/Gallery and Michelangelo (2012 TV series)/Gallery. And, for the most part, this is alleviated by keeping the thumbnails small, so that there's less of a strain on the client.

However, this same assumption doesn't necessarily hold for GIF animations. Full-size versions need not bet more than a few hundred by a few hundred pixels, and yet can be files that are multiple megabytes in size. And, naturally, their animated thumbnails are also rather large, especially if there are many of them.

So, as a practical matter, I propose that gallery pages with a lot of animations should be split into separate galleries for still images and animated images, and perhaps mutually linked for navigation convenience. After all, on some of these galleries, even with a cable internet connection, it can take a few minutes for all of a page's thumbnails to load.

I know this is a problem that I have partially created. :) Before I became a regular editor, most of the GIFs in galleries were taken sporadically from random Tumblr pages, and were not very numerous. But I've made well over 1000 animated GIFs for this wiki, most of which are just under 2 megabytes each, and whose thumbnails can easily exceed several hundred kilobytes to one megabyte.  And I cross-reference them in multiple appropriate galleries, sometimes creating quite voluminous animated GIF sections.  It improves the site's media, which is good.  It also makes the galleries slower to load.  That's why I propose this. 