Better slideshow experience

rccoleman

I'm a bit puzzled by what I consider to be a poor slideshow interface for a (pay) site that claims to stress user interface and image presentation. I'm coming from Flickr for a more professional experience and I'm surprised by a few of things in the slideshow feature:

1. You can't navigate from picture to picture using the arrows keys
2. The "filmstrip" at the top pops up *over* the picture and remains there for quite some time without any way to dismiss it
3. When it does disappear on its own, moving the mouse causes it to reappear and (again) obscure a portion of the image
4. Because of #1, you *have* to move the mouse to navigate from picture to picture

It seems very amateurish, and, in my humble opinion, Flickr's doing a much better job in this area. It allows you to use the arrow keys for navigation with no visual distraction, but still pops up some info and a filmstrip if you move the mouse.

I found a thread on this from back in May here and an entry in the "uservoice" feature request area here (feel free to vote it up!).

Perhaps most people don't use the slideshow functionality (I see a lot of folks asking to disable it for some reason), but I think it's the most effective and efficient way to show off my pictures when I'm away from my main computer. Is there a technical limitation? I'm not sure if I want to pay the premium for Smugmug over Flickr if important functionality is crippled this way.

Thanks,
Rob

Malte

rccoleman wrote:

1. You can't navigate from picture to picture using the arrows keys
2. The "filmstrip" at the top pops up *over* the picture and remains there for quite some time without any way to dismiss it
3. When it does disappear on its own, moving the mouse causes it to reappear and (again) obscure a portion of the image
4. Because of #1, you *have* to move the mouse to navigate from picture to picture

I agree on all points but I'm a lousy ally. Lightbox, especially combined with the new thumbnails view, totally replaces Slideshow view for me. Click any image and you get the (much better) slideshow experience, advance with arrow keys to your heart's content and click the image again to get back to the grid, which replaces the filmstrip.The only thing that this doesn't have is automatic advance.

Soo, let's request user selectable automatic advance for Lightbox, and then we can put Slideshow view out to pasture! :hide

Malte

rccoleman

Thanks for your reply, Malte. The "Lightbox" view is closer to what I'm looking for in terms of navigation, but it's not fullscreen. When I'm flipping through the pictures, I'd like to them to be as big as they can be (which, interestingly enough, is something that Smugmug stresses on their own help page), and not have the browser decorations taking up a substantial amount of real estate and detracting from the image.

If they made it fullscreen, I guess it would look more like the slideshow view .

Rob