Preloading images is good in certain situations especially if the user is on low speed internet connection or the image size is quite high. So here are 8 Cool jQuery Image Preloading Plugins that can help you to do this.

Unveil

Most of us are familiar with the Lazy Load plugin by Mika Tuupola. This plugin is very useful and it boosts performance delaying loading of images in long web pages because images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) won’t be loaded until the user scrolls to them. Lazy Load has some cool options such as custom effects, container, events or data attribute. If you’re not gonna use any of them you can reduce the file size by leaving just the essential code to show the images. That’s what I did and this is my lightweight version of Lazy Load with support for serving high-resolution images to devices with retina displays – less than 1k.

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PreloadJS

PreloadJS makes it easy to preload your assets: images, sounds, JS, data, or others. It uses XHR2 to provide real progress information when available, or fall back to tag loading and eased progress when it isn’t. It allows multiple queues, multiple connections, pausing queues, and a lot more.

Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery

Lazy Load delays loading of images in long web pages. Images outside of viewport wont be loaded before user scrolls to them. This is opposite of image preloading.

ChilliLoader

ChilliLoader is a lightweight jQuery plugin what preloads your site with style. The plugin shows a well designed spinning loader with a stylish background to your visitors while your site loads. You can completely customize the ChilliLoader for your needs, choose the background from 4 existing variations or add your own design, choose the spinning loader from 8 color variations. It’s easy to use and supports any modern browser, iPhone and Android smartphones and tablets.

Preloadify

Preloadify is a very easy to use image preloading plugin. Its size is 3kb and works in all browsers. Preload images easily and it has lots of options. Can be used anywhere, no need to change the code one bit.

Simple Content Loader

This plugin creates a simple ajax loader for images and content. This is a true alternative to using an IFRAME .

imagesLoaded

A jQuery plugin that triggers a callback after all the selected/child images have been loaded.

JAIL

JAIL aka jQuery Asynchronous Image Loader plugin is a lightweight plugin for jQuery (just 4Kb for the minified version), really simple and powerful. It is used when you have got images, which have large dimension, in a page and you do not want to compromise the user experience making the page load slow. The main concept behind this plugin is deferring the loading of the images after the page is loaded.