Crude hack to show an obstructed view of a page's background image

zubenelgenubi

All,

Here's a crude hack to solve a problem that's been bugging me for some time.

In New Smugmug, I set most of my galleries and pages to display a background image. This image is chosen at random from a smart gallery, that is in turn populated by images to which I've assigned the keyword "backgrounds". The effect is that there is different randomly chosen background image each time a user views the page or gallery. This is great, but I've always been frustrated by the thought that if a user sees a background image they like, they have no way to display it clearly, without foreground content obscuring parts of it. I've submitted a feature request for this functionality, and asked around on this forum if anyone has a way to do it, but so far I haven't seen a solution. So, in case anyone else is interested, here's a crude hack that (sort of) does what I'm looking for.

All you have to do is add a big chunk of empy vertical space at the bottom of your page! If the user scrolls down, they'll see the background clearly, because all the foreground content will have scrolled off the top of the screen. How easy is that? You can do this in New Smugmug using the customizer. Just add a Design->Spacer content block at the bottom of your page, and make it rather tall vertically. I set mine to a vertical height of 1500 pixels.

You can even automate this a bit, by putting an internal anchor at the bottom of the page, after the big vertical space, and adding a hyperlink to it somewhere near the top of the page. You can see an example of this at:

http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com

I added an HTML content block near the bottom of the page, after my vertical spacer, containing just this code snippet:

<a name="bg_photo_clear_view"></a>

That creates an anchor to jump to. I then put a link to this anchor in the menu block that appears just below my slide show. The link name is simply "Background Image". Clicking on it gives you an unobstructed view of the background image. The link that I used simply reads as http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/#bg_photo_clear_view

I know this is a crude hack, but it works okay, and you don't need any fancy knowledge of how to find the actual URL of the particular background image that has been chosen at random each time. You could tweak it further, (say) by adding "a back to top" link that appears at the bottom of your otherwise clean background image. But I prefer not to clutter it, and to let the user simply use their "back" button instead. (I did add a secong vertical spacer block, to push the "pwered by smugmug" stuff down out of the way, but that is just a small detail.)

I wish I knew of a more elegant solution, but for now this works for me...

- Mark

bobbyhero

Cool, thanks for sharing.