Cover Photo Issues...

erik64

Is there a way to turn off the gallery cover photo feature for mobile and/or vertically oriented devices? They look fine on a horizontal desktop monitor but are a mess on everything else. Also, you can't hide the photo that is being used for the cover image - kind of a bummer, especially if your cover photo is also one of the first images in the gallery. Don't you folks ever beta test anything?

Allen

All of a sudden I have what looks like a cover photo showing up on some mobile galleries in a browser.
This completely destroys my navigation between galleries as the gallery description is overridden. The gallery title is even missing?
Looking thru the gallery settings I can not find a way to turn them off. Smugmug style galleries.

last good gallery http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2017-Birding/Birding-2017-December/2017-12-20-Riverlands-Migratory-Bird-Sanctuary/

It starts going bad with this gallery and newer. This is only on mobile browser. The mobile app is not showing my description anywhere but nobody uses it so don't care.
bad http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2017-Birding/Birding-2017-December/2017-12-22-Carylye-Lake-Harlequin-Duck
bad http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2018-Birding/Birding-2018-January/2018-01-10-Riverlands-Migratory-Bird-Sanctuary
bad http://www.photosbyat.com/Birds/2018-Birding/Birding-2018-January/2018-01-January-Yardbirds

leftquark

Would you be able to expand on what doesn’t look good about the vertical display of the gallery cover image? SmugMuggers have been enjoying cover image for almost a year and a half and typically it looks better on mobile since it drops down to a square orientation that shows more of the photo.

I tested a few of my own cover images on mobile and I’m not seeing any issues with them...

erik64

Well, if you give me a long skinny space to fill on my desktop monitor, I'm going to choose a long skinny image that will work well in that space. Guess what? It probably won't work as a square. Photographers are typically careful about how their images are composed and I imagine most aren't going to happy about how this, or any other "feature" automatically reimagines their carefully considered pano crop into a damned square. Seriously. There have to be options for the more particular types of people who only want their work displayed as it was intended. I'm glad you're happy with how your pics look, I'm not at all happy with mine. Please give us an option to turn this feature off for mobile or vertically oriented devices and/or please give us a second cover image choice that will be used when a different format is necessary. At a minimum, how about adding some framing guides (whatever other aspect ratios will be necessary) that will be visible when you are adjusting your chosen cover image. Oh, one more suggestion - It would be helpful if, when adjusting the cover image, you could just click through the images from the gallery until you find the one that works best. It's a hassle to have to keep diving back into SETTINGS every time.

Jtring

I'm seeing what Allen described, although the bug appears a little more complicated. First, to test out Allen's report, I created a new unlisted gallery in SmugMug style at https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Other/Test-Galley-January-2018/n-LfKMQm/ When I view it in a desktop browser window narrow enough to force mobile mode, it's still in SmugMug style. When I go into Firefox's responsive design mode and select "Google Pixel" I get just the thumbnails, but with a cover image! When I bring the gallery up in Chrome on my real Pixel 2, it matches Firefox's responsive mode. I then looked at one of my old SM style galleries (https://jtringl.smugmug.com/Browser/Families/Boraginaceae/). In Firefox's responsive mode emulating a Google Pixel there is no cover image, but again, only the thumbnails are there. A trip the the real Pixel 2 confirms that change.

So it looks like the real oddity here is changing SM style galleries to all thumbnails (with or without a cover image) on a mobile but not on a mobile-sized desktop image. I'm not sure the switch would be all that bad a thing ... if it were optional, not automatic, and if there were a way to control the presence and selection of the cover image.

Given that, the cover image behavior sort of follows what we've seen. Older galleries that could have a cover image don't automatically have them, but new ones do.

By the way, I checked that my CSS wasn't somehow causing this: same behavior when I remove it.

Screen captures from the desktop below, first a pair from the new SM gallery and then a pair from my the old one. (Let me know if the pictures don't show. This is, I think, my first shot at posting a picture in the Vanilla Dgrin. I just uploaded them.)

Jtring

A partial work-around for the issue above. I find that if I edit the new SM style gallery in the organizer, change it to Collage Landscape, change the cover image settings, switch back to SM style, and save ... then on a mobile those changed cover image setting apply. That works for turning the cover image off. That works for changing the cover image selection.

Allen

Great, it worked, fixed my bad galleries.
Thanks

@Jtring said:
A partial work-around for the issue above. I find that if I edit the new SM style gallery in the organizer, change it to Collage Landscape, change the cover image settings, switch back to SM style, and save ... then on a mobile those changed cover image setting apply. That works for turning the cover image off. That works for changing the cover image selection.

leftquark

Thanks for pointing this out. It looks like this was a bug that has existed since we launched Cover Image almost a year and a half ago but is now more prevalent once we changed the default value.

On mobile-web, SmugMug style galleries are displayed as Thumbnail style. When a gallery is set to SmugMug style, we hide the option for setting Cover Image (since it's not supposed to be displayed), however, on new galleries it's still getting set to ON when the gallery is created. So what happens is the gallery gets created with the settings:

• Style = SmugMug
• Cover Image = ON

On desktop, SmugMug style properly disables cover image. On mobile-web, it loads the Thumbnail style and ignores the fact that the Style is really set to SmugMug and ends up displaying the cover image.

I'd like to get this fixed: if Gallery Style is set to SmugMug we should honor that and never display Cover Image, even on mobile-web. I'll find some time to slot this to be fixed in the next few weeks (potentially sooner ... I'm still assessing the priority).

Jtring

On mobile, the original SM style gallery doesn't even turn into "real" thumbnail style. There are no captions. It's just naked thumbnails. As noted, I can see circumstances where that would be OK, but I'd also like to have full SM style on mobile available. Simply removing the cover from the naked thumbnail display doesn't cut it. It's true that moving to the lightbox provides some of the same functionality, but it isn't quite the same. You have to tap to bring up captions for each picture and random access requires going back to the main gallery page. Galleries I have in SM style are the ones where random access is more important than following a sequential thread or story line through the images.

Jtring

@leftquark said:
... It looks like this was a bug that has existed since we launched Cover Image almost a year and a half ago ...

I've been mulling this one. Over the last few years I've tried to make sure my CSS changes were OK on a mobile display as I introduced them. And I didn't catch this.

Then I realized I'd mostly been checking mobile compatibility by narrowing the browser window down enough so the display hopped into one-column alignment (736px viewport width or less), thinking that was enough. As noted in my big post a few up, it wasn't: SM style is retained on a narrow desktop browser viewport while the display moves to thumbnails on an actual or emulated mobile.

I think this is the first time I've seen a major mobile behavior change tied to target device rather than just viewport width.

Is this the wave of the future, using the target device, not viewport width and @media blocks in the CSS, to drive display variations? (I can imagine arguments for and against.) Is it already in play elsewhere that I need to check for compatibility with the custom CSS?

leftquark

@Jtring said:
Is this the wave of the future, using the target device, not viewport width and @media blocks in the CSS, to drive display variations? (I can imagine arguments for and against.) Is it already in play elsewhere that I need to check for compatibility with the custom CSS?

I've always been aware that SM style reverted to thumbnails on mobile web but, like you, this was the first time I noticed that our code actually changes the HTML, instead of using CSS to alter the mobile display. It's not our intent to do this frequently -- if we can we'll resize/fit to the device size using CSS rather than totally changing the HTML for the device.
(Just for the record, SM style has always been this way on new SmugMug -- I mention it so that you can get a sense of how frequently we've done something like this ... or rather how infrequently)