I have a custom Google Map containing many markers, each of which contains an image in its infowindow. When I embed the map on a site, the page seems to be downloading every single one of these images when the map is viewed, which results in an unnecessarily enormous page size (around 50MB on every view of the page). Since these images are loaded from our own server, that potentially represents a massive and unnecessary amount of strain on the server / use of bandwidth.
Is there any way of telling Google Maps not to pre-download these images, but instead to AJAX load a marker's content only when that particular marker is clicked on? Since this is the default behaviour on non-custom Maps, it feels like there must be a simple way of doing this.