Can something PLEASE be done about the awful slideshow thumbs???

Tim Kamppinen

Ok, there are huge problems with the slideshow gallery style, and they mostly all center around the obnoxious thumbnail bar. The problem is that it pops up and obscures the photos! And the only way to get it to disappear is to not touch the mouse for FOUR SECONDS. That might as well be an eternity.

See, what I would like to do is set up slideshow style galleries as portfolios. However, this just doesn't work as currently implemented. First, I want people to be able to navigate around the portfolio, not just watch a passive slideshow. However, if you use the thumbs to navigate around, they're constantly popping in over the image and you have to wait forever for them to disappear just to see the photo. It's totally obtrusive and very annoying.

Of course, I could disable the thumbs. That creates new problems, however. Now if people actually want to watch the slideshow passively, they have no way to control the speed, and since the default is quite slow, it ends up being boring. Second, there's no visual indicator to people of how many images might actually be in the gallery, so they just have to wait around and see, which is even worse since the default speed is so slow as previously mentioned (another issue--no way to set custom speeds for the slideshow. Even "fast" is slow for me...). At least with the thumb bar you can see that there are more images coming up. It's also easier to get back to an image you saw previously without having to scroll through every other image to get there with the buttons.

So, can't the slideshow gallery style be modified so that it displays the thumbs in a position that doesn't obscure the image? It would make the slideshow style actually worth using. Right now it's just a bad joke. I honestly don't know how it ever got released like that. It's just terribly frustrating and ugly to have the big thumb bar always covering up your images, and the only way to avoid it is to take your hand off the mouse and just sit there and wait for the painfully slow march of the slides. OR to forgoe all the advantages of the thumb bar and only display buttons, which is just as bad for different reasons.

I really want to have portfolio galleries on my site that look like portfolios, not exactly like the client galleries, but currently there is not a gallery style that will allow me to do this with any sort of elegance. If this one small change was made to the slideshow gallery style, it would be perfect for this. As it is I'm stuck with smugmug style for everything.

Tim Kamppinen

I also just realized that the embedded slideshows do basically what I'm asking for. They have the thumbs fixed at the bottom of the screen, out of the way, not obscuring the photos, but available when you need them. So I could just create an html only gallery and embed a slideshow of the images that I want in the portfolio. Of course, the huge problem with that is that I then have to pick a fixed size and cannot take advantage of the stretchiness of the actual slideshow gallery style.

Tim Kamppinen

Ok, I also have discovered that if I enable thumbs on the stretchy slideshow that I have on my homepage, they don't obscure the image. So I guess I could make an html only gallery, embed a stretchy slideshow like the one on my homepage, with thumbs enabled, and that would do what I want.

I just might do that. However, it would still be much nicer if the actual gallery style could be modified. I don't see how anyone could actually like the way the thumbs currently behave. If nothing else, couldn't it be an option to have pop-up or fixed thumbs?

darryl

I hate the pop-up thumbnails too, Tim.

Filed a "feature request" about it too:

http://smugmug.uservoice.com/pages/17723-smugmug/suggestions/300234-let-us-turn-off-thumbnails-for-non-embedded-slide-shows-

Please vote (for whatever that's worth).

Andy

darryl wrote:

Please vote (for whatever that's worth).

Uh, it's worth a lot that's why we took the time, energy and money to put this system in place

Andy

Tim Kamppinen wrote:

And the only way to get it to disappear is to not touch the mouse for FOUR SECONDS. That might as well be an eternity.

Thanks for the feedback!

bhockensmith

Tim, I completely agree! I turned gallery slideshows on for a little bit and had so many complaints about the slow speed and the thumbnails over that I had to turn the slideshows off again.

Sigh.

Tim Kamppinen wrote:

Ok, there are huge problems with the slideshow gallery style, and they mostly all center around the obnoxious thumbnail bar. The problem is that it pops up and obscures the photos! And the only way to get it to disappear is to not touch the mouse for FOUR SECONDS. That might as well be an eternity.

See, what I would like to do is set up slideshow style galleries as portfolios. However, this just doesn't work as currently implemented. First, I want people to be able to navigate around the portfolio, not just watch a passive slideshow. However, if you use the thumbs to navigate around, they're constantly popping in over the image and you have to wait forever for them to disappear just to see the photo. It's totally obtrusive and very annoying.

Of course, I could disable the thumbs. That creates new problems, however. Now if people actually want to watch the slideshow passively, they have no way to control the speed, and since the default is quite slow, it ends up being boring. Second, there's no visual indicator to people of how many images might actually be in the gallery, so they just have to wait around and see, which is even worse since the default speed is so slow as previously mentioned (another issue--no way to set custom speeds for the slideshow. Even "fast" is slow for me...). At least with the thumb bar you can see that there are more images coming up. It's also easier to get back to an image you saw previously without having to scroll through every other image to get there with the buttons.

So, can't the slideshow gallery style be modified so that it displays the thumbs in a position that doesn't obscure the image? It would make the slideshow style actually worth using. Right now it's just a bad joke. I honestly don't know how it ever got released like that. It's just terribly frustrating and ugly to have the big thumb bar always covering up your images, and the only way to avoid it is to take your hand off the mouse and just sit there and wait for the painfully slow march of the slides. OR to forgoe all the advantages of the thumb bar and only display buttons, which is just as bad for different reasons.

I really want to have portfolio galleries on my site that look like portfolios, not exactly like the client galleries, but currently there is not a gallery style that will allow me to do this with any sort of elegance. If this one small change was made to the slideshow gallery style, it would be perfect for this. As it is I'm stuck with smugmug style for everything.

darryl

Did SmugMug try to fix this?

I recently hit a website that was linked to go directly to slideshow style and was surprised to see that the thumbnails were perched *above* the image. So the image was reduced in size, but at least the thumbnails didn't cover it.

I was enjoying going forward and backwards manually (clicking on arrows) without the images being obscured, but when I let the slideshow play automatically, we went back to fullscreen. Ok...

But then I moved my mouse, and the godawful thumbs were back, covering up the image. And not just the current image, but all subsequent images that I manually clicked to see.

Thumbnails that obscure the primary image while simply trying to manually navigate are just plain annoying.

I don't know if the behavior I saw was supposed to fix this, but it's not working yet.

I'm on Chrome 3.0.195.32, XP SP2.

Andy

darryl wrote:

Did SmugMug try to fix this?

I recently hit a website that was linked to go directly to slideshow style and was surprised to see that the thumbnails were perched *above* the image. So the image was reduced in size, but at least the thumbnails didn't cover it.

I was enjoying going forward and backwards manually (clicking on arrows) without the images being obscured, but when I let the slideshow play automatically, we went back to fullscreen. Ok...

But then I moved my mouse, and the godawful thumbs were back, covering up the image. And not just the current image, but all subsequent images that I manually clicked to see.

Thumbnails that obscure the primary image while simply trying to manually navigate are just plain annoying.

I don't know if the behavior I saw was supposed to fix this, but it's not working yet.

I'm on Chrome 3.0.195.32, XP SP2.

We've not changed anything on this, yet.

Malte

Andy wrote:

We've not changed anything on this, yet.

Looking forward to that!

Malte