Journal and Slideshow extreme makeovers

Baldy

Big photos and stretchy goodness have come to Journal style. Instead of medium-sized images staggered
back and forth with captions alternating left and right, we made room for bigness by placing the photos
centered with captions on the bottom. Example.

If you have a big monitor and widen your browser, the size of those photos Should. Make. A. Statement.
There are some photos you just need to see big, like this one from Andres Stapff at Reuters (used by permission):



Whatever the width of your visitor's browser, it will do the right thing and select resolutions that don't
require horizontal scrolling.

It should work with all themes, but not all themes stretch to the full width of the browser on big
monitors. We recommend picking stretchy themes.

You can still force the old Journal style from Customize Gallery if you've used it to make pricelists, etc.

Slideshow style also got a big makeover. It's cleaner and now fills as much of the screen as we can.
Just go to any gallery that doesn't have its style forced, like this one, then pick slideshow
from the style button. Customizers can give their fans a full-browser slideshow
with their awesome design: Example on Andy's site.

Critique and filmstrip styles have been pulled from the style button, but you can still force them in
Customize Gallery.

Release notes.

Gotcha: If you're a power or pro, you have to enable "stretchy" on your customize page...

jfriend

Nice improvements to journal and slideshow.

I noticed that the style button has finally been YUI-fied and looks like it fits on the page properly now with the rest of the controls - that's good. Folks who had implemented the YUI style button customization will have to remove it now (because they now have two style buttons).

Sunnyvalejohn

That really looks great!!! Nice job to the team.

Now I just need to get rid of this small 23" monitor and get a pair of 30" monitors!

Keep Shooting!
John

denisegoldberg

Very nice!

And thank you for leaving the old journal style as a selection - I use that in two galleries as a point of direction to my travel journals. Without the old journal-style I would need to build html-only galleries.

--- Denise

Andy

denisegoldberg wrote:

Very nice!

And thank you for leaving the old journal style as a selection - I use that in two galleries as a point of direction to my travel journals. Without the old journal-style I would need to build html-only galleries.

--- Denise

Yeah Denise - we wanted to intro the new style w/out ruining AboutMe galleries, Guestbooks, etc. We'll build in a Guestbook / About Me feature, and I'd hope, an update to Old Journal style, that allows for creative uses that folks are doing now with Journal. We're gathering input, here. You'll probaly want to build those HTML galleries at some point, or, use our new journal Can't say more, because I don't know more at this point...

Allen

The only problem with the new slideshow style are the captions cover the slide
the same as with FSSS. Especially if the caption is large, it can cover most of
the slide and looks like trash. We need a way to turn off captions for the
style and FSSS. Perhaps a way to set the font and size would help, the
current font and size is terrible. Not everyone is running large shows.

Take a look on a smaller monitor and not a 30" one and you'll see how terrible it looks.

denisegoldberg

Andy wrote:

Yeah Denise - we wanted to intro the new style w/out ruining AboutMe galleries, Guestbooks, etc. We'll nuke the olde one altogether someday, can't say when, but we definitely plan to phase it out... and we'll build in a Guestbook / About Me feature. You'll probaly want to build those HTML galleries at some point, or, use our new journal Can't say more, because I don't know more at this point...

Thanks Andy - I was just doing a little playing to see if the new journal style will work for my travel stories galleries. It's interesting, because I want to highlight my newest travel story plus have links to all of the stories. Certainly making the photo larger highlights it. I didn't switch the gallery to the new journal style yet, but I suspect I will over the weekend.

I've already added the code to make the journal caption background a lighter shade of gray - the darker gray that defaulted for me (with a white background) made it uncomfortable for my old eyes to read the text.

My About page is already an html-only gallery, but my guestbooks aren't. And while I like the "in your face" look of the new journal style, that doesn't work well (for me) as the top of a guestbook. So I'll probably convert those to html-only galleries.

--- Denise

wellman

Way cool! Any chance you'd consider implementing keyboard shortcuts? Boston.com's Big Picture uses "J" and "K" for image-hopping, which can be superior to scrolling and stopping.

Andy

Allen wrote:

The only problem with the new slideshow style are the captions cover the slide
the same as with FSSS. Especially if the caption is large, it can cover most of
the slide and looks like trash. We need a way to turn off captions for the
style and FSSS. Perhaps a way to set the font and size would help, the
current font and size is terrible. Not everyone is running large shows.

Take a look on a smaller monitor and not a 30" one and you'll see how terrible it looks.

Thanks Allen - I've made sure our team has seen this.

Allen

wellman wrote:

Way cool! Any chance you'd consider implementing keyboard shortcuts? Boston.com's Big Picture uses "J" and "K" for image-hopping, which can be superior to scrolling and stopping.

DO NOT ADD ANY MORE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS!! It's a pita now trying the
cntl-a to select all in page and it jumps to lightbox. And try to search for
something in the page by typing in a letter like a.

wellman

Allen wrote:

DO NOT ADD ANY MORE KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS!! It's a pita now trying the
cntl-a to select all in page and it jumps to lightbox. And try to search for
something in the page by typing in a letter like a.

Perhaps, just smarter handling of keyboard shortcuts? They're wonderful for mouse-o-phobes or laptop browsing.

darryl

Allen wrote:

..
2. Searching by typing is not a standard option. What browser is that?..[/url]

darryl

Oh, and lest you think I'm in a good mood today or something...

Slide show still has no option to disable that super-annoying floating thumbnail bar. I *HATE* that bar.

I want keyboard shortcuts to advance/go back, and barring that, I want to be able to click on the forward/back arrow keys and *NOT* have every image marred by that stupid thumbnail bar.

There. Back to my normal curmudgeonly self. That feels great. :-}

Allen

darryl wrote:

2. Searching by typing is not a standard option. What browser is that?..[/url]

OOps, sorry Darryl, hit edit instead of reply and lost of your post.

Have you not seen that option with Firefox? Been there forever.
Sure help searching quickly in a page.

Allen

Slideshow style looks like a piece of (flash) with the background color that
comes up and no way to change it. CAPTIONS SHOULD NOT BE ON TOP OF
SLIDES HIDING THE PHOTO. You can see here how bad it looks.

Allen

From today's Popular photos, caption covers 48.32% of photo. This is terrible.
With a really big caption the whole photo would probably be covered.
Slideshow style

Andy

Allen wrote:

From today's Popular photos, caption covers 45% of photo. This is terrible.
With a really big caption the whole photo would probably be covered.

Hey Allen, we get it - but you can turn captions off, too.

The problem is, we don't really have a way of knowing how much room for the caption and for the photo. But Shizam continues to ponder creative ways to deal with this.

Thanks for telling us like it is, Allen.

Allen

Andy wrote:

Hey Allen, we get it - but you can turn captions off, too.

The problem is, we don't really have a way of knowing how much room for the caption and for the photo. But Shizam continues to ponder creative ways to deal with this.

Thanks for telling us like it is, Allen.

Oh, there is a caption toggle?

It's so small I bet 90% of viewers never see it. And if my Dad did he's not a
precision surgeon to be able to click on it. Most times it hides too quick to
notice before they can read what it says.

We need a parameter that can be put in js to hide the thumbs and captions.

lynnesite

Holy cow, the new journal just rocks. I got goosebumps viewing my OWN stuff, in this gallery which has quotes as captions. Congrats and thanks to the team! http://lynnesite.smugmug.com/gallery/6797869_NJrEz

NateW

Anyone notice that when you view a slide show on a really wide monitor (24" imac for instance...) that the bottom of the images gets cut off if the browser is set to that really wide level? I've been looking at the example slideshows and thinking I wasn't sure why someone would pick this image or that, cuz there just didn't seem to be much of interest in it and all the good stuff seemed too closely cropped.
Then I shrunk the width a bit and got the point...
For example: (i'll try to get an image in here, but try it with a wide, not too tall, browser window to fit 16x9) (OK, it's an attachment)
This image is screen shot from Andy's page (hope it's OK, Andy!) with a caption of Oban to Criagnure Ferry (2nd image after the IR clouds).

Original image (screen shot of whole desktop): 1920 x 1200
Firefox window set to max-wide.

jfriend

NateW wrote:

Anyone notice that when you view a slide show on a really wide monitor (24" imac for instance...) that the bottom of the images gets cut off if the browser is set to that really wide level? I've been looking at the example slideshows and thinking I wasn't sure why someone would pick this image or that, cuz there just didn't seem to be much of interest in it and all the good stuff seemed too closely cropped.
Then I shrunk the width a bit and got the point...
For example: (i'll try to get an image in here, but try it with a wide, not too tall, browser window to fit 16x9) (OK, it's an attachment)
This image is screen shot from Andy's page (hope it's OK, Andy!) with a caption of Oban to Criagnure Ferry (2nd image after the IR clouds).

Original image (screen shot of whole desktop): 1920 x 1200
Firefox window set to max-wide.

This seems to be a slideshow bug that afflicts some folks and Andy says they are working on.

MasterCow

I like the new journal view, however I believe there is a small problem -- the photos are too big! So big, in fact, that I cannot see the entire photo without scrolling. Here's a screenshot to show you what I mean:




I think I should be able to see the entire photo at once, yes? My screen resolution is 1680x1050.

Erick L

Andy wrote:

We'll nuke the olde one altogether someday, can't say when, but we definitely plan to phase it out... and we'll build in a Guestbook / About Me feature. You'll probaly want to build those HTML galleries at some point, or, use our new journal

That would be catastrophic.

Janneman

Nice improvements but...........

MasterCow wrote:

I like the new journal view, however I believe there is a small problem -- the photos are too big! So big, in fact, that I cannot see the entire photo without scrolling. Here's a screenshot to show you what I mean:




I think I should be able to see the entire photo at once, yes? My screen resolution is 1680x1050.

As much as I like the improvements there is one thing I should remark:
I have to scroll vertically to view the entire photo on my NEC 2060 with the new journal style.

insanefred

Janneman wrote:

As much as I like the improvements there is one thing I should remark:
I have to scroll vertically to view the entire photo on my NEC 2060 with the new journal style.

I agree....

BUT...

I showed some clients, and they LOVE it!

So do I, it's a minor problem. Still rather have it too big than too small

collin85

Excellent work on the Journal overhaul.. I was so impressed I've already switched to it for many of my galleries. Having been with Smugmug for nearly 3 years, this has probably been the upgrade which has impressed me the most.

Two questions though..

1) How do I change the length of the journal page? I'd like to be able to squeeze all my shots in one continuous page, rather than forcing people to navigate multiple pages if possible. Basically, like FlickRiver (a look I had been trying to emulate for awhile on Smugmug but gave up).

2) How do I remove captions? Some of my galleries don't have captions for any of the photos, and it would be nice to have that entire caption grey bar from each shot completely removed.

Thanks in advance,

www.collinzphotography.com

W.W. Webster

Two questions and a comment.

In the new Journal style, clicking on any image to enlarge it is now redundant - I understand that. But how do I select the image to which "this photo" tools will be applied?

In other words, I presume "this photo" is the top/uppermost image. What if I want to apply a tool function to another (just one) image - for example to replace the fourth image, or make the second image the featured image, etc?

I also noticed that landscape images appear to wide in the steps 600 - 800 - 1024 - 1280 - 1600 pixels, but mine don't! I normally load my images as 1000px wide, so I replaced one with a 1600px version but it didn't stretch. What could I be doing wrong?

It's also a shame that the landscape ratio of width : height must exceed some number for the full zooming effect to be applied. This continues to disadvantage square or portrait images, or even landscape images that are not sufficiently wide in relation to their height.

denisegoldberg

W.W. Webster wrote:

I also noticed that landscape images appear to wide in the steps 600 - 800 - 1024 - 1280 - 1600 pixels, but mine don't! I normally load my images as 1000px wide, so I replaced one with a 1600px version but it didn't stretch. What could I be doing wrong?

It's possible that you're seeing the same problem that I am which appears at this point to be a bug - documented in thread I'm officially baffled... help solve a puzzle with my new journal-style gallery, acknowledged by Andy that smugmugBlack and smugmugWhite may need to be updated. He is following up on that.

--- Denise

gbrookshaw

Slideshow options?
Thanks for the update!

In the slideshow, is there any way to turn off the arrows at each side of the photo and also the thumbnail view at the top? I just want the user to focus on the photograph.

Thanks

Andy

gbrookshaw wrote:

Thanks for the update!

In the slideshow, is there any way to turn off the arrows at each side of the photo and also the thumbnail view at the top? I just want the user to focus on the photograph.

Thanks

Letting go of your mouse makes the arrows and thumbnails disappear, thus showing only the photos.

Without the arrows, and pause button, how would one go back to a photo to see it again, or pause while the phone rang, or other interruption?

Andy

Janneman wrote:

As much as I like the improvements there is one thing I should remark:
I have to scroll vertically to view the entire photo on my NEC 2060 with the new journal style.

We did this on purpose, we want the photos biiiiig. We have other styles (like SmugMug Style and Lightbox) that will show photos without any need for scrolling.