Base 64 encode vs loading an image file

It's a very fast and easy solution. Although the image size will increase about 33% in size, using base64 will reduce significantly the number of http requests.

Google images and Yahoo images are using base64 and serving images inline. Check source code and you'll see it.

Of course there are drawbacks on this approach, but I believe the benefits outweighs the costs. A cons I have found is in slow devices. For example, In iPhone 3GS the images served by google images are very slow to render, since the images come gziped from the server and must be uncompressed in the browser. So, if the customer has a slow device, he will suffer a little when rendering the images.

Why regenerate the image again and again if it will not be modified. Hypothetically, even if there are a 1000 different possible images to be shown based on 1000 different conditions, I still think that 1000 images on the disks are better. Remember, disk based images can be cached by the browser and save bandwidth etc etc.

Well I don't agree with anyone of you. There are cases when you've to load more and more images. Not all the pages contain 3 images at all. Actually I'm working on a site where you've to load more than 200 images. What happens when 100000 users request that 200 images on a very loaded site. The disks of the server, returning the images should collapse. Even worse you've to make so much request to the server instead of one with base64. For so much thumbnails I'd prefer the base64 representation, pre-saved in the database. I found the solution and a strong argumentation at http://www.stoimen.com/2009/04/23/when-you-should-use-base64-for-images/. The guy is really in that case and made some tests. I was impressed and make my tests as well. The reality is like it says. For so much images loaded in one page the one response from the server is really helpful.

• Base64 encoding makes the file bigger and therefore slower to transfer.
• By including the image in the page, it has to be downloaded every time. External images are normally only downloaded once and then cached by the browser.
• It isn't compatible with all browsers