I've only read a couple pages of this thread, but I have to agree with Erick. The titles and captions over the photo have to go. HAVE to. It is a cardinal sin to have text over the photo on the page meant to view the photo. I'm not sure what decision making led to this but it has to be changed. Would it not make 1000% more sense to have them directly below the photo like virtually every other photo displaying website on the planet?
> @"Erick L" said: > "The new design is clean, with only the photos title and buy button overlapping the photo." > > So it's not clean then. The first rule of a photo website should be "thy shall not cover the photo in any way". > > Too true! Who buys their own photos anyway?
@bnickeson I just want to say, personally, that not having the ability to show captions would be more of a sin. I don't have strong opinions about over or under, but as it was done at first to omit entirely is worse than over.
But that's an opinion. I think the real message to SM is that photographers have a lot of (often strong) opinions that conflict with each other. Any single choice they make for us is going to result in many of us being unhappy.
The answer is simple: OPTIONS!
One thing great about SM is that people customize their site, that it's not a bunch of cookie cutter galleries all the same for each photographer with just color differences or a few themes.
Give us options, and we will create and SM will benefit.
@Ferguson said: @bnickeson I just want to say, personally, that not having the ability to show captions would be more of a sin. I don't have strong opinions about over or under, but as it was done at first to omit entirely is worse than over.
I strongly agree that they still need titles and captions, but they need to move them below the image like...well...every other photo website on the planet. I seriously cannot believe that putting text over the image in the lightbox was even a consideration.
I don't know much about coding, but the tough part about their current design is that there is not a div box below the image in Lightbox, so I'm not sure that some relatively simple CSS edits could move the title and caption below. I'd think it would take a significant amount of additional code to do that. That would have to be done by smugmug. If they really wanted to, they could keep the current div box at the bottom of the image, create a new one below the image, then give the user the choice on whether to put the text over the image or below it.
@leftquark said:
What do you expect to happen if the caption is below the photo and the caption becomes long?
First I'll say that I agree with others here in wanting to be able to see title and caption below the photo. I do not want text to overlay the images. As for what I would like to happen for long captions, personally, mine aren't that long (though longer than one line) and I would like the entire caption to display. If the image had to shrink to accommodate the caption I would be fine with that -- as long as the image shrinks only enough to make the caption fit below it, rather than routinely shrinking to something very small. Also, it would help if the design could adapt based on whether someone is viewing a landscape or portrait screen. For landscape, e.g., on a computer, It makes sense that the title and caption display next to the buy button (below the image) because there is more room across the screen. But for portrait, e.g., on a phone, why not display the title and caption above the buy button, below the image.
Another option for landscape screens would be to automatically show the title, caption, and buy button to the side of the photo, where there is plenty of room. Etsy and art.com are examples of sites where this occurs. On a computer, the text and buy buttons appear to the side of the image, but on a phone they appear below.
I have posted my comment earlier, and I would like to repeat it again, with a little more emphasis:
PLEASE RESTORE IMAGE SIZE SELECTOR!
I work with the younger crowd. 95% of them are on their phones 95% of their time. Which means they can only see the smallest (aka crappiest) version of the image. So when they share our work on social media, they are doomed to share the worst possible copy, which reflects poorly on me as a photographer as well.
Image size selector in its previous incarnation was taking like 25x25 pixels. The new lightbox has plenty of real estate on its menu on the left.
Why remove useful functionality that didn't hurt anybody?
@Nikolai I have a similar issue (poor sizes shared), but can you elaborate on how the image size selector helped that? I thought it was because they were simply grabbing the displayed image, and I keep trying to get them to download using the download arrow where I can control size.
Did you find a way to use the selector to change what gets shared, for example, on facebook? Or worse, I've had real media outlets (once ESPN who should know better) just grab a phone screen shot, and it looks horrible. But I assumed it was an education issue not something I could fix.
@hadron said:
How is Jack Bauer able to get his captions below the photo? He in not using the new LB design.
I like the scrolling if captions are long...
@hadron said:
How is Jack Bauer able to get his captions below the photo? He in not using the new LB design.
I like the scrolling if captions are long...
I don't believe his site is a SmugMug site.
I think it is a SM site. He may be a Portfolio or Pro SM user.
Sorry for the confusion. Yes, his is not a smugmug site. I was just using it as a reference for what the potential look could be (and should be, IMO) with the titles and captions below the images. I would have just posted a screenshot but figured that might be a bit shady without giving credit to the website's photographer.
Every so often I get locked in a lightbox zoom screen. Zoom in and out quickly works but occasionally locks in and can't get back to the normal LB view.
Win7 Firefox 69.0 (64 bit)
@evansmug said: Hi folks, Evan here (filling in for @leftquark while he's out). As noted, captions and title additions are now live for both normal lightbox view as well as slideshow. The intent was indeed for captions/titles to remain on the photo, specifically during slideshow playback. You'll notice titles/captions still do auto-hide in normal lightbox view. For slideshow, we wanted to ensure the viewer has the most ideal experience. Given the short duration of each photo on the screen during playback, it feels more ideal to have the title/caption continuously show (so the user can read, while not having to manually interact with the mouse). Also, it looks less jumpy when titles/captions are not appear/disappearing constantly as the photos progress.
@leftquark This post was now a couple of weeks ago - I keep checking random galleries and I still see neither captions nor titles in the slideshow although they display in the lightbox. Am I somehow missing something? (PS: I have no custome CSS that could affect this.) Thanks, Sara
@evansmug said: Hi folks, Evan here (filling in for @leftquark while he's out). As noted, captions and title additions are now live for both normal lightbox view as well as slideshow. The intent was indeed for captions/titles to remain on the photo, specifically during slideshow playback. You'll notice titles/captions still do auto-hide in normal lightbox view. For slideshow, we wanted to ensure the viewer has the most ideal experience. Given the short duration of each photo on the screen during playback, it feels more ideal to have the title/caption continuously show (so the user can read, while not having to manually interact with the mouse). Also, it looks less jumpy when titles/captions are not appear/disappearing constantly as the photos progress.
@leftquark This post was now a couple of weeks ago - I keep checking random galleries and I still see neither captions nor titles in the slideshow although they display in the lightbox. Am I somehow missing something? (PS: I have no custome CSS that could affect this.) Thanks, Sara
Sara, I you have not already found a solution to this, here is something to try. You may have slideshow titles/captions turned off. The control to turn them on is very obscure. Go to a gallery, select Customize / Content and Design. Mouse over the main gallery display and click the wrench at the upper left of the blue or green box that that appears around that main gallery section. That will bring up the Gallery Styles selection box. At the bottom, click the arrow to the right of the word "Slideshow". A menu will appear where you can adjust a variety of options, including whether captions are or are not shown. This dialog box may have been originally meant to set options when the whole gallery uses the Slideshow style, but it also sets options for the slideshow display in the Lightbox.
@Jtring said:
Sara, I you have not already found a solution to this, here is something to try. You may have slideshow titles/captions turned off. The control to turn them on is very obscure. Go to a gallery, select Customize / Content and Design. Mouse over the main gallery display and click the wrench at the upper left of the blue or green box that that appears around that main gallery section. That will bring up the Gallery Styles selection box. At the bottom, click the arrow to the right of the word "Slideshow". A menu will appear where you can adjust a variety of options, including whether captions are or are not shown. This dialog box may have been originally meant to set options when the whole gallery uses the Slideshow style, but it also sets options for the slideshow display in the Lightbox.
Wow, thanks - that did the trick. Totally obscure, I would have never found it.
I'm glad that helped. Let me add one thing I should have noted in my earlier post. If the gallery you selected uses the gallery template (ones where a blue box appears around the main gallery content when you select Customize / Content and Size), then changes made as I described only apply to galleries still on the template. You will need to change off-template galleries (ones where a green box appears) individually. Conversely, if you started with a off-template gallery, you will also need change an on-template gallery and all other off-template ones.
(Comment to SmugMug. Someday, it would nice to have the gallery style and Lightbox detail controls in the Organizer where bulk changes are possible, rather than inside the Customize / Content and Size process. The introduction of Lightbox Version 2 has highlighted that sometimes it's useful to get at these and that they are both hard to find and complex to use if the goal is to update the behavior of many off-template galleries. Moving controls from the Customize / Content and Size process to the Organizer is obviously not a trivial change and not one I'd give top priority, but whenever it's time to revamp the Organizer, please consider it.)
@Jtring said:
(Comment to SmugMug. Someday, it would nice to have the gallery style and Lightbox detail controls in the Organizer where bulk changes are possible, rather than inside the Customize / Content and Size process. The introduction of Lightbox Version 2 has highlighted that sometimes it's useful to get at these and that they are both hard to find and complex to use if the goal is to update the behavior of many off-template galleries. Moving controls from the Customize / Content and Size process to the Organizer is obviously not a trivial change and not one I'd give top priority, but whenever it's time to revamp the Organizer, please consider it.)
Yes, the Lightbox customizations were a “quick fix” an engineer did a number of years ago without any thought to its usability. We’ve long wanted to make those settings much easier to find but we’re holding off until we can do a much bigger improvement to how all settings are set.
After a few weeks I'm used to the strength and weakness of the new light-box.
An improvement is that I use the captions now to tell the story of the photo. That's nice.
The discussion if text should be on or below the photo is a personal choice. Indeed as suggested: give your users the option to choose.
I do also have e few suggestion for further improvement:
-1- While in light-box the icon in front of the title is to much. The side menu has this already. The icon on the photo is only distracting. It's much more cleaner to have only text (or for some users no text).
-2- When there's no title/caption the icon and text 'VIEW DETAILS' is not necessary because the icon is already in the side menu.
-3- The landscape and portrait have different height for icon and text. It's much nicer to have the same text height on every photo.
-5- On mobile browser landscape there's no title. The visitor has to click the details icon to see the title and caption. It opens a whole screen filling window to show just a few lines of text. I find this a bad solution. The visitor has to click the arrow to close. Very inconvenient.
Finally I support strongly the request that's earlier done to have a 'library' where the customization are documented. If tried a few on my own but in 50% failed to get the right results. CSS is difficult to understand how and when to apply.
But as stated earlier I'm quite satisfied the ways SmugMug LB works. It's far more better then the old one.
@leftquark said:
Last year many of you will recall that we announced improvements to the way you and your visitors browse photos in the "Lightbox". Those improvements have been living in the Organizer for you to experience and provide your feedback. We listened and decided that additional improvements could be made to make your browsing experience even better. Our design team went back to the drawing board, we tested several design concepts with many of you and have been tirelessly working to build an even more amazing Lightbox.
I'm pleased to announce that our new Lightbox is now available for you to experience within the Organizer. Open any photo in the Organizer and you can see the beautiful and more functional browsing experience.
Not only is the new Lightbox gorgeous, but we've made it easier for you and your visitors to engage and take actions on your photos.
The new design is clean, with only the photos title and buy button overlapping the photo. Since most screens are wider than your photos, we've taken advantage of the empty space next to your photos to incorporate actions and information. The action buttons like sharing, downloading, commenting can be found to the left of the photo. Viewing the photos title, caption and metadata is also included in this space to the left. These action buttons, as well as the navigation arrows, have their own space on the left and right of your photo, ensuring they never overlap with your photo.
Additional photo information and actions are done in this sidebar on the left. Instead of the Sharing, Commenting and Buying experiences living on top of your photo, they now live next to it, so you and your visitors can enjoy the photo while also taking those actions.
The buying experience has also been integrated next to the photo, making it easier for you and your customers to purchase prints and gifts of your photos.
We've also built this to look amazing on mobile and tablet devices. The entire experience has been built with these devices in mind and swiping and interacting with your photos has been vastly improved.
Lastly, we built this with Customization in mind, since we know many of you love to tweak and personalize your experiences. A number of the most common Customizations are built into this Lightbox (for example, captions never overlap the photos, and tooltips indicate what the various icons stand for). Although the Lightbox can't be customized in the Organizer, when it makes its way into galleries and content blocks, we'll be providing sample CSS code to do a number of personalizations to the Lightbox. Stay tuned for those in a later post. For those of you that had started to Customize the previous version of the new Lightbox, those customizations will need to be rebuilt, though some may continue to work.
We're really excited to continue to roll this out across all experiences on Lightbox but are starting from within the Organizer for now. Please post here, write to our heroes and let us know your thoughts. All of us have fallen in love with this new Lightbox and we hope you do as well.
The new "LightBox" changes stink! The viewing experience is lousy and unacceptable. You broke my web site on Windows, Android and my iPad. Totally crappy what you did to my SmugMug site! And CSS code to fix some of the issues shows does not fix all the issues some of the code does not work because of the underlying bad programming. Totally disappointed and annoyed with these bogus changes!
...and on the other side of the coin, I am completely happy with the new lightbox. For me the text display is perfect just where it is. Please don't change a thing - or if you do, then make it customizable to the current view.
Comments
I've only read a couple pages of this thread, but I have to agree with Erick. The titles and captions over the photo have to go. HAVE to. It is a cardinal sin to have text over the photo on the page meant to view the photo. I'm not sure what decision making led to this but it has to be changed. Would it not make 1000% more sense to have them directly below the photo like virtually every other photo displaying website on the planet?
Facebook | 500px | Flickr
> "The new design is clean, with only the photos title and buy button overlapping the photo."
>
> So it's not clean then. The first rule of a photo website should be "thy shall not cover the photo in any way".
>
> Too true! Who buys their own photos anyway?
@bnickeson I just want to say, personally, that not having the ability to show captions would be more of a sin. I don't have strong opinions about over or under, but as it was done at first to omit entirely is worse than over.
But that's an opinion. I think the real message to SM is that photographers have a lot of (often strong) opinions that conflict with each other. Any single choice they make for us is going to result in many of us being unhappy.
The answer is simple: OPTIONS!
One thing great about SM is that people customize their site, that it's not a bunch of cookie cutter galleries all the same for each photographer with just color differences or a few themes.
Give us options, and we will create and SM will benefit.
I strongly agree that they still need titles and captions, but they need to move them below the image like...well...every other photo website on the planet. I seriously cannot believe that putting text over the image in the lightbox was even a consideration.
I don't know much about coding, but the tough part about their current design is that there is not a div box below the image in Lightbox, so I'm not sure that some relatively simple CSS edits could move the title and caption below. I'd think it would take a significant amount of additional code to do that. That would have to be done by smugmug. If they really wanted to, they could keep the current div box at the bottom of the image, create a new one below the image, then give the user the choice on whether to put the text over the image or below it.
But yeah, the change needs to be made.
Facebook | 500px | Flickr
What do you expect to happen if the caption is below the photo and the caption becomes long?
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
First I'll say that I agree with others here in wanting to be able to see title and caption below the photo. I do not want text to overlay the images. As for what I would like to happen for long captions, personally, mine aren't that long (though longer than one line) and I would like the entire caption to display. If the image had to shrink to accommodate the caption I would be fine with that -- as long as the image shrinks only enough to make the caption fit below it, rather than routinely shrinking to something very small. Also, it would help if the design could adapt based on whether someone is viewing a landscape or portrait screen. For landscape, e.g., on a computer, It makes sense that the title and caption display next to the buy button (below the image) because there is more room across the screen. But for portrait, e.g., on a phone, why not display the title and caption above the buy button, below the image.
Another option for landscape screens would be to automatically show the title, caption, and buy button to the side of the photo, where there is plenty of room. Etsy and art.com are examples of sites where this occurs. On a computer, the text and buy buttons appear to the side of the image, but on a phone they appear below.
I have posted my comment earlier, and I would like to repeat it again, with a little more emphasis:
PLEASE RESTORE IMAGE SIZE SELECTOR!
I work with the younger crowd. 95% of them are on their phones 95% of their time. Which means they can only see the smallest (aka crappiest) version of the image. So when they share our work on social media, they are doomed to share the worst possible copy, which reflects poorly on me as a photographer as well.
Image size selector in its previous incarnation was taking like 25x25 pixels. The new lightbox has plenty of real estate on its menu on the left.
Why remove useful functionality that didn't hurt anybody?
@Nikolai I have a similar issue (poor sizes shared), but can you elaborate on how the image size selector helped that? I thought it was because they were simply grabbing the displayed image, and I keep trying to get them to download using the download arrow where I can control size.
Did you find a way to use the selector to change what gets shared, for example, on facebook? Or worse, I've had real media outlets (once ESPN who should know better) just grab a phone screen shot, and it looks horrible. But I assumed it was an education issue not something I could fix.
Have the caption be multiple lines? If someone writes a novel, it just needs to run out the bottom of the page.
I happened to be looking at Jack Brauer's images yesterday and realized that if you moved the title, caption, and buy button below the image it would look fairly similar to his website's setup. https://mountainphotography.com/photo/sneffels-summit-sunset-panorama/?gallery=bestsellers
I hope it's OK to post his link in here as an example.
Facebook | 500px | Flickr
How is Jack Bauer able to get his captions below the photo? He in not using the new LB design.
I like the scrolling if captions are long...
I don't believe his site is a SmugMug site.
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
I think it is a SM site. He may be a Portfolio or Pro SM user.
I looked at the pages with web developer in Firefox and I didn't see any SmugMug code.
Musings & ramblings at https://denisegoldberg.blogspot.com
It is NOT a SM site. Look at the source code (ctl+U).
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
The website originator is at the bottom of page. Not Smug.
My Website index | My Blog
Sorry for the confusion. Yes, his is not a smugmug site. I was just using it as a reference for what the potential look could be (and should be, IMO) with the titles and captions below the images. I would have just posted a screenshot but figured that might be a bit shady without giving credit to the website's photographer.
Facebook | 500px | Flickr
Every so often I get locked in a lightbox zoom screen. Zoom in and out quickly works but occasionally locks in and can't get back to the normal LB view.
Win7 Firefox 69.0 (64 bit)
My Website index | My Blog
@leftquark This post was now a couple of weeks ago - I keep checking random galleries and I still see neither captions nor titles in the slideshow although they display in the lightbox. Am I somehow missing something? (PS: I have no custome CSS that could affect this.) Thanks, Sara
Sara, I you have not already found a solution to this, here is something to try. You may have slideshow titles/captions turned off. The control to turn them on is very obscure. Go to a gallery, select Customize / Content and Design. Mouse over the main gallery display and click the wrench at the upper left of the blue or green box that that appears around that main gallery section. That will bring up the Gallery Styles selection box. At the bottom, click the arrow to the right of the word "Slideshow". A menu will appear where you can adjust a variety of options, including whether captions are or are not shown. This dialog box may have been originally meant to set options when the whole gallery uses the Slideshow style, but it also sets options for the slideshow display in the Lightbox.
Wow, thanks - that did the trick. Totally obscure, I would have never found it.
I'm glad that helped. Let me add one thing I should have noted in my earlier post. If the gallery you selected uses the gallery template (ones where a blue box appears around the main gallery content when you select Customize / Content and Size), then changes made as I described only apply to galleries still on the template. You will need to change off-template galleries (ones where a green box appears) individually. Conversely, if you started with a off-template gallery, you will also need change an on-template gallery and all other off-template ones.
(Comment to SmugMug. Someday, it would nice to have the gallery style and Lightbox detail controls in the Organizer where bulk changes are possible, rather than inside the Customize / Content and Size process. The introduction of Lightbox Version 2 has highlighted that sometimes it's useful to get at these and that they are both hard to find and complex to use if the goal is to update the behavior of many off-template galleries. Moving controls from the Customize / Content and Size process to the Organizer is obviously not a trivial change and not one I'd give top priority, but whenever it's time to revamp the Organizer, please consider it.)
Yes, the Lightbox customizations were a “quick fix” an engineer did a number of years ago without any thought to its usability. We’ve long wanted to make those settings much easier to find but we’re holding off until we can do a much bigger improvement to how all settings are set.
Former SmugMug Product Team
aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
After a few weeks I'm used to the strength and weakness of the new light-box.
An improvement is that I use the captions now to tell the story of the photo. That's nice.
The discussion if text should be on or below the photo is a personal choice. Indeed as suggested: give your users the option to choose.
I do also have e few suggestion for further improvement:
-1- While in light-box the icon in front of the title is to much. The side menu has this already. The icon on the photo is only distracting. It's much more cleaner to have only text (or for some users no text).
-2- When there's no title/caption the icon and text 'VIEW DETAILS' is not necessary because the icon is already in the side menu.
-3- The landscape and portrait have different height for icon and text. It's much nicer to have the same text height on every photo.
-5- On mobile browser landscape there's no title. The visitor has to click the details icon to see the title and caption. It opens a whole screen filling window to show just a few lines of text. I find this a bad solution. The visitor has to click the arrow to close. Very inconvenient.
Finally I support strongly the request that's earlier done to have a 'library' where the customization are documented. If tried a few on my own but in 50% failed to get the right results. CSS is difficult to understand how and when to apply.
But as stated earlier I'm quite satisfied the ways SmugMug LB works. It's far more better then the old one.
https://www.vanronton.nl/
There's also no intuitive way of closing the "details" when opening them from there.
I have a different background color under the title and caption: https://www.borealphoto.com/Marche/Mont-des-Morios/i-qSSzPVs/A
How do i get rid of that?
borealphoto.smugmug.com
If you don't want the gradient, then add this to your theme's custom CSS section:
.sm-user-ui .sm-lightbox-v2-photo-buttons-scrim-dark { background: transparent; }Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
Erik L.:
How are you putting the Title and Caption BELOW the photo?
He's adding this:
.sm-user-ui .sm-lightbox-v2-photo-buttons { padding:0; bottom:-60px }BUT this only works because the photos are Panoramic.
Images in the Backcountry
My SmugMug Customizations | Adding CSS to Your Site | SEO for the Photographer | Locate Your Page/Widget Number | SmugMug Help Desk
The new "LightBox" changes stink! The viewing experience is lousy and unacceptable. You broke my web site on Windows, Android and my iPad. Totally crappy what you did to my SmugMug site! And CSS code to fix some of the issues shows does not fix all the issues some of the code does not work because of the underlying bad programming. Totally disappointed and annoyed with these bogus changes!
...and on the other side of the coin, I am completely happy with the new lightbox. For me the text display is perfect just where it is. Please don't change a thing - or if you do, then make it customizable to the current view.