User report Favorite mode... Thumbnails
TBT
Registered Users Posts: 40 Big grins
I've been playing with the various modes trying to find the perfect one for family and friends. Here's the input I've received and observations I've made along with a few suggestions for future changes:
Original (big pict on right thumbnails on the left)
While I like this I found a lot of folks were confused by it. It may be mom-proof but it's not grandma proof, most of my audiience over 50 never realize there is more than one page of pictures. After explaining it on the phone I'm still not sure they get it so I hesitate to use the mode.
Journal Mode (new style)
I personally love the new journal mode. It's the closest thing I've found to the "storybook" email mode of picasa combined with outlook express. Picasa can generate an outlook express HTML email of your pictures that is editable. This allows me to intersperse text (in any font/size) between the pictures to tell a story. With the journal mode I create pictures containing just text to break up sections and tell a story in my gallery similar to the Picasa solution.
However this mode is not a favorite of my audience. While it works great on my 9mb/s cable connection my family and friends have a mixture of dsl/cable with varying bandwidths and quality. The complaint I get is that photos fail to load, and a refresh of the web page just results in diferent photos failing to load.
Thumbnail mode
Is this new or has it always been this good?
I force it to put all thumbnails on a single page, thus avoiding the pagation confusion of the standard mode. For some reason this mode seems to be way more tolerant of slow connections, perhaps because each individual picture is so much smaller thus having a lower chance of failing?
While it "works" for my friends/family and lately it's the one I'm using, I loose something from the journal mode. It does not tell a sequential "story" well as the journal mode does, and I loose control of what my viewers see as they control what they zoom in on. While I'd like to think my friends/relatives look at and treasure every one of my photos in full size, I know from the way I look at pictures that they are looking at what looks interesting in a thumbnail, possibly missing excelent photos (for example the skipped thumbnail of boring uncle bob has within it a great picture of a 4 year old with a DSLR taking the picture... reflected in his mirroed sun glasses)
However thumbnail mode is not perfect:
One issue I have with the thumbnail mode is that after zooming in there is no way to advance to the next photo (as there is in zenfolio) so my users end up zooming in/zooming out and so on.
Finally, my friends/family cover the entire gamut of tech savyness. While I want to control to a "T" what the less tech savy see I'd still like my tech savy friends to have the option to change to gallery view to whatever they like.
Unfortunately right now I can't force a default gallery mode and still alow users to change to whatever they like. It would be great, if you allowed setting a default mode BUT still alow the option for users to change the view......
Of course the answer to all this is just play the slide show. However then all of my videos are lost.
What's up with allowing videos to automagically play in slide shows?
Original (big pict on right thumbnails on the left)
While I like this I found a lot of folks were confused by it. It may be mom-proof but it's not grandma proof, most of my audiience over 50 never realize there is more than one page of pictures. After explaining it on the phone I'm still not sure they get it so I hesitate to use the mode.
Journal Mode (new style)
I personally love the new journal mode. It's the closest thing I've found to the "storybook" email mode of picasa combined with outlook express. Picasa can generate an outlook express HTML email of your pictures that is editable. This allows me to intersperse text (in any font/size) between the pictures to tell a story. With the journal mode I create pictures containing just text to break up sections and tell a story in my gallery similar to the Picasa solution.
However this mode is not a favorite of my audience. While it works great on my 9mb/s cable connection my family and friends have a mixture of dsl/cable with varying bandwidths and quality. The complaint I get is that photos fail to load, and a refresh of the web page just results in diferent photos failing to load.
Thumbnail mode
Is this new or has it always been this good?
I force it to put all thumbnails on a single page, thus avoiding the pagation confusion of the standard mode. For some reason this mode seems to be way more tolerant of slow connections, perhaps because each individual picture is so much smaller thus having a lower chance of failing?
While it "works" for my friends/family and lately it's the one I'm using, I loose something from the journal mode. It does not tell a sequential "story" well as the journal mode does, and I loose control of what my viewers see as they control what they zoom in on. While I'd like to think my friends/relatives look at and treasure every one of my photos in full size, I know from the way I look at pictures that they are looking at what looks interesting in a thumbnail, possibly missing excelent photos (for example the skipped thumbnail of boring uncle bob has within it a great picture of a 4 year old with a DSLR taking the picture... reflected in his mirroed sun glasses)
However thumbnail mode is not perfect:
One issue I have with the thumbnail mode is that after zooming in there is no way to advance to the next photo (as there is in zenfolio) so my users end up zooming in/zooming out and so on.
Finally, my friends/family cover the entire gamut of tech savyness. While I want to control to a "T" what the less tech savy see I'd still like my tech savy friends to have the option to change to gallery view to whatever they like.
Unfortunately right now I can't force a default gallery mode and still alow users to change to whatever they like. It would be great, if you allowed setting a default mode BUT still alow the option for users to change the view......
Of course the answer to all this is just play the slide show. However then all of my videos are lost.
What's up with allowing videos to automagically play in slide shows?
0
Comments
Thumbnails style got a refresh a couple months ago. You'll want to subscribe to our Release Notes blog, so that you don't miss a single update from SmugMug
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
Sure there is. Click thumbnail to go to lightbox, then use the arrows in top of your screen, to click and navigate. Or the arrows on your keyboard
Portfolio • Workshops • Facebook • Twitter
There are just three things that annoy me a little bit with it:
1. When you use the mouse to advance the photo by clicking on the little arrow button on top of the big image, then during the AJAX-based loading of the next image, the arrow disappears and might appear at a slightly different position. Especially when switching between image 9 and 10, or 99 and 100 and so on. This is really annoying for mouse users. They want to keep on clicking to advance to the next picture, without having to move their mouse.
2. It would be nice to make it configurable in this style to advance the picture in the "big picture" mode by simply clicking on the picture itself. Currently, this goes back to the thumbnails page.
3. Is there a way to change the spacing between the thumbnails and the thumbnail size?
1. Yes, I can see your point. I've passed it on to our product management team.
2. This is a SmugMug default when viewing photos in the Lightbox (with the exception of videos) and I don't think it'll change anytime soon.
3. That may be possible with customizations - you could ask for that on our customization forum.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero
That should work with thumbnail style as well.
We just don't recommend adding more than 500 photos (on a fast connection or even fewer on slower connections) to a single gallery as the bulk tools might slow down considerably or stop working due to browser timeouts.
Sebastian
SmugMug Support Hero