Gallery & Performance Overhaul

Gallery — Loading & Visuals

• Image cards now show a smooth glass shimmer while loading instead of bouncing dots
• Images fade in cleanly once ready rather than snapping into place
• Overall feel is significantly more fluid throughout

Gallery — Character Scroller

• Featured Characters bar rebuilt with real generated image slideshows and cinematic transitions
• Scroller is properly draggable on desktop with smooth momentum on mobile
• Collapsible with a hide/show control
• Each card shows character stats and a Filter button to narrow the gallery instantly

Gallery — Layout & Navigation

• Sort options are now compact pill buttons
• Active filters show as dismissible chips so you always know what is applied
• Empty states show proper context-aware messages
• Gallery title now carries the brand gradient with less wasted space overall

Gallery — Image Modal

• Redesigned dark modal with always-visible navigation arrows
• Images crossfade as you move between them — no blank flash between transitions
• Character info and related images load quietly in the background after the modal opens

Performance — Page Transitions

• A request queuing mechanism was forcing simultaneous loads to wait for each other
• Requests that can run in parallel now do — dead time between page transitions is gone

Performance — Gallery Load Times

• Public gallery was recalculating rankings across hundreds of thousands of images on every page load
• Pages that took 4 to 16 seconds now load in under a second
• Random sort rebuilt from a pre-fetched pool and is comparably fast

Performance — Character & Memory Browsing

• Character scroller endpoint rebuilt from scratch — was taking up to 17 seconds, now under a second
• Home page, search page, and profile character fetching all faster
• Memory filtering and favorites loading similarly optimized

Performance — Your Images & Profile

• Loading your own images previously required scanning the entire image library
• A targeted index now makes this near-instant — down from around 26 seconds to under 200ms

Performance — Image Modal

• Modal now opens immediately with the image
• Supporting details load in afterward so you are never waiting on background data