New Story map (beta slideshow) slow load times

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02-18-2020 12:27 PM
JosephRosnow__-_DG
New Contributor III

The new story map with beta slideshow option does not allow the choice to host an image or video, upload only.  Which makes it feel like the load times are very slow to load the entire story map.  I have had this story map released for not even a week and I have already had several complaints about the load times.  Any suggestions other then making the entire story map size smaller or the size of the photos smaller(bigger photos have better resolution)? 

Seems unrewarding to get a story map this far and have a slow story map load time.  Is it a product loading the story map over public WIFI? Desktop vs Laptop? Hosting source?

It seems other story maps I have viewed that are large and complex load much quicker, and I have no videos in it.

Any suggestions would help, thanks, Joe

ArcGIS StoryMaps 

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3 Replies
Melissa__Danielle_Pugh
New Contributor III

All the images loaded quickly for me except for the animated spring that lagged a little the rest came up right away. 

OwenGeo
Esri Notable Contributor

Hi Joseph -- I apologize that you are getting reports of slow loading for the images in your story.

Like Danielle reported, all the images in your story were fully loaded for me when I scrolled quickly through the story (except the spring video, also mentioned by Danielle).

Is there any common thing about the location or network environment of the people who are reporting this?

I can assure you that the reason uploading is the preferred method of adding images to a story map is because of performance. We do a lot of things under the hood to optimize performance such as compress large images, send only an appropriate sized image depending on the screen size of the person viewing the story, and cache images on a CDN. However, some locations or organizations may still have slow connections or block/throttle external.

You can add a linked image by using the Embed option and pasting in the direct link to an image. You could try this as a test. This is typically not preferred since directly linked images are not resized, compressed, or cached, but in your case perhaps you have an internal web server that your readers get a better connection to. 

Owen Evans
Lead Product Engineer | StoryMaps
JosephRosnow__-_DG
New Contributor III

Thanks for the quick response, after hearing the feedback from peers in the last week or so it sounds like the loading issue has everything to do with loading over public WiFi that experiences large user volume. 

Thanks for the detailed response, Joe