Preloading background images

Question

I'm building a page that loops through 3 different backgrounds, changing every 750ms. To do this, I'm adding a class to the body with the relevent background image, changing with JS. For the first loop through, they flash because the image has to load, so it's not there instantly. Therefore is there any methods I can use to preload the images?

CSS:

&.backgrounds{
    background-position: center bottom;
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
    background-size: 130%;

    &.freddy{
        background-image: url(/img/illustrations/snapchat/snapchat_holding_page_freddy.jpg);
    }

    &.irene{
        background-image: url(/img/illustrations/snapchat/snapchat_holding_page_irene.jpg);
    }

    &.joe{
        background-image: url(/img/illustrations/snapchat/snapchat_holding_page_joe.jpg);
    }
}

JS:

setInterval(function() {
    if ( $('.backgrounds').hasClass('freddy') ){
        $('.backgrounds').removeClass('freddy').addClass('irene');

    } else if ( $('.backgrounds').hasClass('irene') ){
        $('.backgrounds').removeClass('irene').addClass('joe');

    } else if ( $('.backgrounds').hasClass('joe') ){
        $('.backgrounds').removeClass('joe').addClass('freddy');

    }
}, 750);

Answer 1

I would do something like this. loadImages returns a Promise that will resolve once all of the images are loaded. The .then attached to it calls cycleImages, which starts up the interval. Since you will need the URLs in the JS anyway to do the pre-loading, instead of class switching I'm directly manipulating the background-image, that way you can remove the image URLs from the CSS and save a few redundant bytes. This also makes it easier to expand the list of images in the future too, you only need to add an item to the array of images instead of maintaining a complicated if statement.

function loadImages (images) {
  // each image will be loaded by this function.
  // it returns a Promise that will resolve once
  // the image has finished loading
  let loader = function (src) {
    return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
      let img = new Image();
      img.onload = function () {
        // resolve the promise with our url so it is
        // returned in the result of Promise.all
        resolve(src);
      };
      img.onerror = function (err) {
        reject(err);
      };
      img.src = src;
    });
  };

  // create an image loader for each url
  let loaders = [];
  images.forEach(function (image) {
    loaders.push(loader(image));
  });

  // Promise.all will return a promise that will resolve once all of of our
  // image loader promises resolve
  return Promise.all(loaders);
}


// the images we are going to display
let myImages = [
  'http://www.gifpng.com/400x200',
  'http://www.gifpng.com/400x200/ffffff/000000',
  'http://www.gifpng.com/400x200/000000/ffffff'
];

// $(document).ready(fn) is deprecated,
// use the $(fn) form instead
$(function() {

  // after the images are loaded this will be called with an array of the loaded images
  function cycleImages (images) {
    let index = 0;
    setInterval(function() {
      // since we need an array of the image names to preload them anyway,
      // just load them via JS instead of class switching so you can cut them
      // out of the CSS and save some space by not being redundant
      $('#backgrounds').css('backgroundImage', 'url("' + images[index] + '")');
      // increment, roll over to 0 if at length after increment
      index = (index + 1) % images.length;
    }, 750);
  }


  // load the images and start cycling through them after they are loaded
  loadImages(myImages).then(cycleImages).catch(function (err) {
    console.error(err);
  });
});

#backgrounds {
  height: 200px;
  width: 400px;
  border: 1px solid #000;
}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="backgrounds"></div>

Edit: Taking Just a student's comments into account, here is a version that will only switch the image once it is loaded, but do it right away if it is loaded. It also skips images that failed to load. Since cycleImages is no longer called via .then, I also changed it so it accepts a target element (as a jQuery object) along with an array of images promises. That way you can easily use this on multiple places on a page with different images sets if you wanted to.

function loadImages (images) {
  // each image will be loaded by this function.
  // it returns a Promise that will resolve once
  // the image has finished loading
  let loader = function (src) {
    return new Promise(function (resolve, reject) {
      let img = new Image();
      img.onload = function () {
        // resolve the promise with our url
        resolve(src);
      };
      img.onerror = function (err) {
        reject(err);
      };
      img.src = src;
    });
  };

  // return an array of image-loading promises
  return images.map(function (image) {
    return loader(image);
  });
}


// the images we are going to display
let myImages = [
  'http://www.gifpng.com/400x200',
  'http://www.invalid-domain-name.foo/this-url-certainly-does-not-exist.jpg',
  'http://www.gifpng.com/400x200/ffffff/000000',
  'http://www.gifpng.com/400x200/000000/ffffff'
];

// $(document).ready(fn) is deprecated,
// use the $(fn) form instead
$(function() {

  // this receives an array of the promises for each image
  function cycleImages ($target, images) {
    let index = 0,
      interval = 750; // how many ms to wait before attempting to switch images

    function nextImage () {
      // p is the promise for the current image
      let p = images[index],
        next = function (wait) {
          // increment our counter and wait to display the next one
          index = (index + 1) % images.length;
          setTimeout(nextImage, wait);
        };

      // wait for this image to load or fail to load
      p.then(function (src) {
        // it loaded, display it
        $target.css('backgroundImage', 'url("' + src + '")');
        next(interval);
      }).catch(function (err) {
        // this one failed to load, skip it
        next(0);
      });

    }

    // start cycling
    nextImage();
  }


  // load the images and start cycling through them as they are loaded
  cycleImages($('#backgrounds'), loadImages(myImages));
});

#backgrounds {
  height: 200px;
  width: 400px;
  border: 1px solid #000;
}

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<div id="backgrounds"></div>

Instead of hard-coding the interval between images changes you could also pass that in as a parameter. At that point though, I would refactor it to use a config object to pass everything but the image promise array: cycleImages(myImages, {target: $('#backgrounds'), interval: 1000});