populate UITableViewCell with JSON Base64?

Question

Is it a good idea to return thumbnail images in base64 through JSON in a RESTful call for populating UITableViewCell's? Or should one really make n requests for n images (lazy loading)? What's better?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You always want to start showing results to a user as fast as possible.

If your UITableView's cells will contain both text and images, get the text values first and show that, with placeholders for the graphics. Then retrieve the images (one by one, or batched up).

Also, load the images a binary values, not base64 (because base64 encoding results in more bytes being transferred).