I find ZenPhoto a bit slow at the moment. When I check my old Plogger installation on the same server I can see that in ZenPhoto it takes longer for the images to show up.

I don't know the reason for this, but I would like to try to get the images on screen as quickly as possible. With that in mind, I would like to disable the exif thing. I will not use it and to be honest, personally I think this information is very superfluous and uninteresting. But that's me .

Could the 'exif data' be made into an option? I disabled the link with css display:none; for now.

Edit:

.... perhaps WordPress is also slowing down the display because the wp-header etc. is called before ZenPhoto can do its work...

What takes longer would be the generation of thumbs since Zenphoto generates them on the fly if someone views the site the first time and they have not been cached already. If you upload relativ big images that might take a little longer, too.

You can use the precache buttons in the admin to avoid that (one on overview for all and one for each album on its edit page).
After everything is cached it should not take very long anymore. I don't see any real speed difference on your site (unless some of the big image are not cached apparently as explained above).

BTW, I don't use any EXIF data, too and this does not really slow down anything for me.

[i]BTW, I don't use any EXIF data, too and this does not really slow down anything for me.[/i]

I was just thinking like this: Every bit of data that has to be pulled from the database, wether it is displayed or not, takes up time (I think, but I'm not a coder ). That's why I thought, why not disable it completely?

By the way, I just tested it... Removing the WordPress php code from the theme template speeds up the display of images considerably, so I will have to make the sidebar links manually. Luckily, there aren't many ...

Asides from that, what makes images diplay more rapidly when using the HighSlide theme instead of a theme that displays images directly on a page? Is it because the page itself (and thus de ZenPhoto code) isn't loaded again and again?

We might consider doing a option to disable that, but it's not really my part of the code, so I can't say if that is possible and/or hard to do.

Actually it should not really make a big difference in speed if it's the cached image or the original upoaded that is displayed. I believe HighSlide uses some sort of javascript preloading.

The Exif data will be loaded to the database if it is used. Once in the database, no more parsing of the EXIF happens. So, this is a one time occurance. After that, it is just the database record which is loaded. It won't make any difference if there is valid EXIF data there or not.

OK, thanks for the explanation .

[i]I believe HighSlide uses some sort of javascript preloading.[/i]
I wonder if this is the case, because while loading the page with the thumbs, the thumbs already react very fast when clicking on them, showing the picture almost immediately. I would like to see a similar effect for one image per page displays, but I quess that's not possible, so displaying using ThickBox would be an option for me.

Of course you can add javascript preloading to the image.php. It has been done before. Since jQuery is our standard js libary you might give this a try http://www.mattfarina.com/2007/02/01/preloading_images_with_jquery
Note, I haven't tried this, since it's older it might not work with the current jQuery version. Of course you could use any other custom solution, too.

(BTW, preloading is good for fast connections, but slows down on slower ones)

Thanks for the link. There is an updated version of that info:
http://www.innovatingtomorrow.net/2008/04/30/preloading-content-jquery

It could work when each time a single image is displayed on a page, only the next and previous image (or two images) would be preloaded. But I wouldn't know how to do that (not a coder ). Perhaps an idea for a plugin?