Why does Google use base64 encoded data as image src attributes?

Question

All times in my life, I save images on my server as files:

• the originals
• the thumbnails
• the original with watermarks

... all as files in folders.

But today, I'm viewing google images, and the src of images is a base64 encoded hash. What benefit does Google get from serving images in this manner? Why would someone do that instead of just serving images conventionally?

Answer 1

google is sort of obsessed with latency; latency for the page load goes up if your browser has to go and make a separate request to the web server for every image on the page. you can eliminate this latency by writing the data of the image right into the page when you generate the page. i actually see a lot of image-heavy sites, especially blogs, using this technique nowadays.

just because the image is included in the page doesn't necessarily mean it's not stored as files on the web server -- just that the web server process that generated the page has already opened and read the image file and then wrote it's data into the page. google is probably storing the images in it's proprietary and secret data store, but you don't have to.