[noppid]

No, the members browser calls the images, not your site in the case of normal display.

In your case, you are having your site fetch and size the image before displaying the img tags. Doing this causes your site to read the images from those sites which does not happen with an img tag.

So, in a normal situation, you supply the url and the members browser calls for the image.

In your case, your server fetches the image from the remote server then creates a url and the members browser fetches the image. That is two calls to a server per image you process. One for your server and one for the member.