comments and view styles

rainforest1155

Hi,

thanks for all those nice changes. I'm very happy with all of it. Still having some suggestions to make:

1. I would like to keep the smugmug style when viewing comments. They should just pop up under the picture like the add-comments-box. This way visitors would not be confused with the one-picture-view-style as there is no easy escape (by clicking on the gallery - which is not a very obvious solution and brings you back to page 1) from it back to smugmug style.
2. As the traditional view is my standard view I would like to have the photo tools in it. They are also needed in the all thumbs view. Even journal view could benefit from them, because changing between view styles isn't very convenient. Yeah, I could click on every picture, but I don't want to see the big picture, just to be able to go to bulk delete or something else.
3. Another nice thing would be when you could tell the browser not to reset the scrollbar when I want to scroll through a couple of pictures. This way I could view whole galleries with a minimal amount of scrolling, because there would be no need to scroll down the footer all the time. Especially in smugmug view this would make a lot sense, because unlike slideshow this enables you to easily skip over certain pictures.
   Is this possible with Ajax?

For the time being I'm out of ideas. I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Number 1 and 2 are the most important ones. Number 3 would be a nice feature to have.

Thanks,
Sebastian

rainforest1155

I forgot something:
4. I would like to have some sort of process bar / greyed out buttons for the comment feature, since with the new Ajax stuff the standard process bar of the browser is not working anymore. Especially for people on dial-up connections or when the line to SM is slow it could be easily mistaken as a problem with the site, because nothing is indicating any activity.
When the button is greyed out (like on ebay when you're placing your bid) you can't accidently press it twice and see that something is going on.

Sebastian

Andy

bump for the rainforest

Mike Lane

Moved to Smugmug Support...

rainforest1155

@Andy - thanks for the bump. I guess our favorite support team is again a littlebit preoccupied at the moment. Usually this means that they're releasing some pretty cool stuff sooner or later.

@Mike - I guess the thread got mixed up in the forum split. Thanks for moving it where it belongs.

Sebastian

rainforest1155

Ben's answear on my questions via email:

Hi Sebastian,

1) Gallery comments are viewed in the gallery, but image comments are
viewed on the single image view. This is to avoid confusion and keep it
consistent. If someone comments on your gallery, it is at the bottom of
the gallery and viewable on any page in the gallery... as it is a
comment for all of the photos. If someone comments on a single image, it
is only viewable under the image that it applies to.

2) Part of the problem with adding tools to Traditional and All Thumbs
is screen real estate. Because there are so many photos, adding photo
tools for each photo means breaking the entire structure of the gallery
by adding so much space to the page beyond what it was designed for. I
will pass the suggestion along though.

3) Making the page static using AJAX removes a lot of features that our
customers really enjoy. Most notably, having a different URL for each
page in the gallery... which allows you to link someone directly to any
page in the gallery. By having the page static with AJAX, you could no
longer link someone to page 33 of a gallery for instance.

4) I will pass the suggestion along!

-Ben

rainforest1155

Hi Ben,

Ben wrote:

1) Gallery comments are viewed in the gallery, but image comments are viewed on the single image view. This is to avoid confusion and keep it consistent.

You're probably right, but how can you get back to the multi-image-view without having to click on the gallery and search for the correct gallery page? I know that there's always the 'back'-button in the browser, but not everybody uses it.

Ben wrote:

2) Part of the problem with adding tools to Traditional and All Thumbs is screen real estate. Because there are so many photos, adding photo tools for each photo means breaking the entire structure of the gallery
by adding so much space to the page beyond what it was designed for. I will pass the suggestion along though.

I use the traditional view almost exclusively, because I know my pictures and just want to browse the galleries quickly and make changes as fast as possible. I can understand you that you probably can't do it for 'all thumbs', because that could mean that you would have to display thousands of 'photo tools' in worst case.
16 'photo tools' on the other hand in traditional should be no problem - it was this way before phase 1!

Ben wrote:

3) Making the page static using AJAX removes a lot of features that our customers really enjoy. Most notably, having a different URL for each page in the gallery... which allows you to link someone directly to any page in the gallery. By having the page static with AJAX, you could no longer link someone to page 33 of a gallery for instance.

Thanks for the explanation. I just thought it might be possible.


Sebastian

rainforest1155

Ben wrote:

3) Making the page static using AJAX removes a lot of features that our customers really enjoy. Most notably, having a different URL for each page in the gallery... which allows you to link someone directly to any page in the gallery. By having the page static with AJAX, you could no longer link someone to page 33 of a gallery for instance.

I posted my new idea on this over here - it involves simple html anchors like I used in the link to my post to jump to my post directly.

Sebastian

{JT}

rainforest1155 wrote:

You're probably right, but how can you get back to the multi-image-view without having to click on the gallery and search for the correct gallery page? I know that there's always the 'back'-button in the browser, but not everybody uses it.

Doesn't the breadcrumb solve this?

rainforest1155 wrote:

I use the traditional view almost exclusively, because I know my pictures and just want to browse the galleries quickly and make changes as fast as possible. I can understand you that you probably can't do it for 'all thumbs', because that could mean that you would have to display thousands of 'photo tools' in worst case.
16 'photo tools' on the other hand in traditional should be no problem - it was this way before phase 1!

I will look in to adding them back for traditional only.

rainforest1155

{JT} wrote:

rainforest1155 wrote:

You're probably right, but how can you get back to the multi-image-view without having to click on the gallery and search for the correct gallery page? I know that there's always the 'back'-button in the browser, but not everybody uses it.

Doesn't the breadcrumb solve this?

You mean that the visitor could then click on the gallery name? Brings him straight to page one and then he has to search for the gallery site where he left off. This might work for smaller galleries, but in galleries with more than 5 pages I would be lost.
What about adjusting the breadcrumb-link back to gallery by adding the page number and photo-id. That way the visitor would land at exactly the same spot he left off.
e.g.: instead of http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/850584
use this http://rainforest1155.smugmug.com/gallery/850584/3/41430314/ as the breadcrumb-link for the gallery.
Would be more convient for me.

{JT} wrote:

I will look in to adding them back for traditional only.

That sounds great - thank you JT.

Sebastian