I love the app but it seems to be very inefficient with caching of data, especially pics. I’ve been surfing c/pics for a few time and very quickly got the mobile data usage alarm, was almost 2Gb. It seems the app is loading all full pictures of the whole community. Not sure how other apps are doing or how it was done by reddit apps but I’d assume the only preload a lower resolution version of the thumbnails of the pics.
Also it seems lemmyconnect is not properly caching the thumbnails. So if I click on a post in the overview to seen the comment, then go back to the overview, all the pic thumbnails have to be reloaded. You can easily see this when you try surfing in low bandwidth situations.
Hi, thanks for your feedback! The thumbnail urls that Lemmy returns via the API are actually the same as the image itself. For example taking the top post on my all frontpage right now I see a post with this image https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/f9c3fb6d-d7ad-4d8e-b0d6-f235a4497ca8.jpeg which is 2800x2707 and my network transferred 924.43 kB. That post via the api also has a thumbnail which is what Connect uses https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/40c8d517-c165-4be6-837f-a0385cf66ed1.jpeg however that thumbnail is also 2800x2707 and 924.43 kB. That said there are definitely optimizations we could be making since pictrs does have an API, it’s just been a bit lower on my priority list!
I will make a couple changes which should improve things though in the next release.
thx for the considerstions. I thought there should be a better way for thumbnails which really should not be the exact size as the image itself. If this is a Lemmy problem itself then I am happy to bring this issue to the Lemmy maintainers. It’s a waste of data/energy, just pointless.
Another related item would be using a configurable disk cache for the image loading - not sure if you’re already using one. That would at least ensure that between app sessions, viewing the same image wouldn’t require re-downloading it.
Thanks for the explanation. I’m surprised to hear there’s no thumbnail since the load time for a lot of these pictures is high enough that I can’t imagine it’s already cached (alch that may be more of an instance issue).