Using Thumbnails for deck views in stead of normal photos

[Swoopy]

Supposing I’ve a physical photo column named “Photo” and this column is used to show photos in deck views.

Will the AppSheet render/run faster in deck views? if I created a virtual column with formula [Photo] and set it to Thumbnail type, then use this virtual column as Main image in deck views.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

I don t think it will improve the app performance, but probably it will make performance worser as it will additionally involve the virtual column calculation before app contents being rendered on sync.

[Swoopy]

I believe the app will perform the same download steps of the photo files. But once the photos are in memory, will the render engine perform faster if it is doing for thumbnails?

Yes there is an additional virtual column but there is no computation in its formula, just reference to the photo column.

Overall, will it run any faster?

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Adding virtual column alone will run additional tasks within app on sync, so I dont believe it runs faster. But i m not pro in this regards, just logically speaking.

[Swoopy]

I didn’t refer to sync process but the navigation among various views within app itself. While it’s not in sync process, will AppSheet render engine perform any faster (less lag) with thumbnails instead of normal photos.

My current way of reducing laggy navigation is to have 1 time calculations and reuse them if possible.

[Steve]

Physical vs virtual column has no effect on rendering or navigation. I don’t now what the effect of using the Thumbnail type would have. Testing is probably the best way to find out.

My impression is that any image scaling is done on the server side, not within the app, so it’s possible having the same image referenced in both an Image column and a Thumbnail column may add more images to download during sync, but I wouldn’t expect it to affect rendering or navigation.

[Swoopy]

If so, there are both images & their thumbnails downloaded into device instead of the images alone. This would consume more memory (RAM) of the device.

This approach may have benefit only if the AppSheet’s on-device rendering algorithm need to be much faster for thumbnails than normal images.

Thinking of this approach is when I heard Matt mentioned (in a tutorial vdo) that using thumbnail type is very useful in deck views.