Displaying photos in SFML

[Fafner]

I'm currently writing a desktop touch screen program to display photographs, and what I want to know is what would be the best way, in terms of performance, to load the photos into textures. I know I'm going to be working with re-sized photos for display and those photos will probably held be on an LAN server. There will be about 30-100+ photos that are going to be scrolled through in each instance of the program. 

Would it be better to hold all these photos as sf::textures or sf::images. Or should I only load them as I'm scrolling though the photos. Or download the re-sized photos to the local machine then load from there.

I'm asking because this program has to work on fairly low end machines, likely without a dedicated video card.

Thanks in advance!

[Laurent]

It's impossible to answer this question. The bottleneck can be many different things: the drive loading time, the CPU decoding time, the LAN transfer time, etc.

You should implement the simplest strategy, and then do some tests/profiling to know how to optimize it.

[Nexus]

Would it be better to hold all these photos as sf::textures or sf::images.

In case the difference is not clear: sf::Image is a simple container that holds the image in RAM. On the contrary, sf::Texture loads the image to the graphics card memory (by using an intermediate sf::Image).

When you have determined the bottleneck, this might help you to optimize more specifically.