The 4 MB thumbnail
Your marketplace shows 24 small product photos per page. On phones it takes ages to load, and your storage bill warns you are over your limit.
This answers: Why are my uploaded images making my app slow? No coding needed. 3 quick decisions.
- Costs and abuse
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Why are my uploaded images making my app slow?
Your app is probably storing and serving the full-size photos users upload, often 4 MB or more, even where they are shown as small thumbnails. Browsers download the whole file before shrinking it. Create smaller copies at upload or with an image service, serve WebP or AVIF, and give each screen the size it needs.
Breaks at File storage: Sends 4 MB originals as thumbnails
How it works
| Version | Size (KB) | Seconds |
|---|---|---|
| Camera original, 4032 px JPEG | 4200 | 3.36 |
| Resized to 1600 px, JPEG | 420 | 0.34 |
| Resized to 1600 px, WebP | 290 | 0.23 |
| Thumbnail, 400 px WebP | 24 | 0.02 |
Why AI tools write this bug
Generated upload code usually saves the file exactly as uploaded and shows it with a small width in the page, which looks fine on a fast laptop with a few test images.
How to fix it
- Check image sizes in the against the size shown.
3 more steps, and a prompt that checks your own app for this bug. Part of Pro.
UnlockCommon questions
- Is WebP smaller than JPEG?
- Usually yes, often by around a quarter to a third at similar quality. AVIF is smaller still, but resizing to the displayed size saves far more than either.