The Bandwidth Hog
By default, Google Chrome is designed to deliver a rich, multimedia experience by automatically loading and displaying every image embedded on a webpage. While this is expected behavior for modern browsing, it is highly detrimental if you are on a metered satellite connection with a strict data cap, tethering to a phone with limited bandwidth, or trying to browse the web on an extremely slow, rural internet connection. Automatically loading dozens of high-resolution images on a news site or blog will cripple your loading speeds and burn through your data allowance in minutes.
Disabling Automatic Image Loading
To drastically speed up page load times on slow connections and stop Google Chrome from automatically loading images, you must restrict the browser’s global media permissions.
Open Google Chrome. Click the three vertical dots in the top-right corner and select Settings. In the left-hand navigation sidebar, click on Privacy and security. In the main panel, click on Site Settings. Scroll down the page until you find the “Content” section, and click on Images. At the top of the Images page, under “Default behavior,” change the selection from “Sites can show images” to Don’t allow sites to show images. Chrome will immediately stop downloading picture files globally, replacing them with small, broken-image icons or alt-text. If you need to see an image on a specific page, you can still add that site to the “Allowed to show images” exception list further down the page, allowing you to browse in a text-only, data-saving mode by default.