Jquery img.load question

Question

I am using the jQuery cycle plugin to cycle through some images. These images are all contained inside a DIV. I don't want the cycle plugin to run until after all of the images have loaded, or at least the first 4 or 5 so that an image doesn't appear that isn't loaded yet. Is there an easy way of doing this?

I tried adding a class 'lastImg' to the last img in the div and adding a 'load' event to that e.g.

Markup
<div id='cycle'>
  <img src=''/>
  <img src=''/>
  <img src='' class='lastImg'/>
</div>

JQuery
    $('lastImg').load(function(){
      $('#cycle').cycle({..});
    });

This seems okay in Chrome and FF, admittedly it's a little flakey (sometimes it doesn't work, maybe if the image is in the cache?) and not at all in IE (surprise, surprise...).

Any other suggestions on how I can do this?

Answer 1

Markup:

<div id='cycle'>
  <img src='path1' class='preload' />
  <img src='path2' class='preload' />
  <img src='path3' class='preload'/>
</div>

Try this:

var cyclerLoaded = false;
var numberOfPreloaded = 0;

function imageLoaded()
{      
  numberOfPreloaded++;

  if (numberOfPreloaded >= 4 && !cyclerLoaded)
  {
    $('#cycle').cycle({..});
    cyclerLoaded = true;
  }
}

$(document).ready(function()
{      

  $('img.preload').each(function()
  {
    // Get image instance.
    var image = new Image();
    image.src = $(this).attr('src');

    if (image.complete)        
      imageLoaded();        
    else        
      image.onload = imageLoaded;

  });

});

...where the preload class is attached to all images you want to preload.