Inititally when I quote the first image post, I see the base64 data inside the quotation marks, once its loaded the whole string (doesnt take long - a fraction of a second) then I see the image previewed inside the quote marks.

The second image post never shows the data - instant image.

This is using chrome on windows.

I already said that using an uploaded image is better. The image is cached, which means when quoted it will be just downloaded once and then the browser will use it multiple times. If you quote a base64 image you're actually doubling the size of it, and if you quote again it's triple that and so on. 

I will give you an example below...

Fred99:

 

 

freitasm:

 

Fred99:

 

 

 

freitasm:

 

freitasm:

 

Fred99:

 

 

 

 

freitasm:

 

freitasm:

 

freitasm:

 

Fred99:

 

 

 

 

 

This page up to this point is now 1.5MB because of the multiple base64 images - if using only the uploaded image it would be a single 300Kbytes download, reused in multiple places.