SmugMug Open Beta - new 'SmugMug' style!

DJKennedy

CavalierPhoto wrote:

Hadn't noticed anything like that initially so I had to double check but no I'm not seeing that and I'm using FF2.

Thanks for the comments on the photos

Odd...hmm... Oh well

Yeah - once I noticed that they where IR, I definately had to check em out. I got interested in IR images this fall. A little too late...now everything is white

bwg

DJKennedy wrote:

Odd...hmm... Oh well

Yeah - once I noticed that they where IR, I definately had to check em out. I got interested in IR images this fall. A little too late...now everything is white

the image shifting has to do with the width of the browser window and the width of the image. we've confirmed it.

bwg

colourbox wrote:

If you have to override the cross-browser default behavior for up/down arrow, I'd prefer up/down arrow to do vertical image navigation in the two-dimensional image grids such as the thumbnail view or the thumbnails on the left side of the default view, working as we're used to in the icon views on the Mac and Windows desktops. For example, if you have 6 thumbnails in 2 rows and you are viewing image 2, pressing Down Arrow would go to the image in that column that's down one row, or image 5. If it is single-image view with no thumbnails at all, I'd prefer up/down arrow to not affect images, only the usual browser scrolling.

that's the way it works now

colourbox

bigwebguy wrote:

that's the way it works now

My bad. I had replied to the message without going back to see what had changed on the test site. When I have more time I will play around some more and see how it feels.

Overall, though, I'm looking forward to the new design!

Allen

I hate to bring this up but the most flustrating thing about the current
right/left arrow navigation hack is when in the edit caption or edit gallery
description boxes. Hit either arrow and it jumps to a different photo
and you'd lose all your edits.

I am completey against this if it's not disabled when in an edit box.
Got so feed up with losing edits I disabled the hack.
Al

bwg

Allen wrote:

I hate to bring this up but the most flustrating thing about the current
right/left arrow navigation hack is when in the edit caption or edit gallery
description boxes. Hit either arrow and it jumps to a different photo
and you'd lose all your edits.

I am completey against this if it's not disabled when in an edit box.
Got so feed up with losing edits I disabled the hack.
Al

yeah, it's supposed to be disabled. we'll look into it.

georges

Alternate view
One major and one minor contribution to the discussion -

First the minor - do I understand that the photo I designate as my bio photo will show up in my comments? I don't care for that. I use the bio photo as the featured photo at the top of my page.

See http://georgesphotos.net

Now, the major point - I think you guys are doing a great job with the new ideas, but you're going to leave the majority of my viewers in the dust. The main purpose of my site is to share family photos. Many of my viewers are elderely family members that have a very limited idea of how the internet works. They have figured out a few ways to havigate and use them for everything.

Using the arrow keys to scroll is an excellent example.

Some of them have pretty shaky hands. They struggle with mouse or touchpad control. The arrow keys are very important to them for getting around a page.

Some of them have laptops with touchpads and we've disabled the "click" functions of the touchpads because they don't have the control to keep themselves from accidently clicking.

It took me months to teach them that the pages may be longer than the screen, and that they needed to scroll. I can't imagine they will hover over anything to wait for a menu.

Once they figured out how to scroll, we figured out that the best presentation for them was to lock the galleries in journal style. That way they can see several images by scrolling and only have to click to get from page to page.

So - what am I asking for?

I'm not suggesting that you don't continue to improve along the path we're seeing in the beta. Please forge ahead. But, as an option, please leave the old styles so we can continue to keep the older folks.

Thanks, gs
<http://georgesphotos.net&gt;

cjyphoto

As far as the "exif/photo details" I like it. I noticed if you drag the exif box to the right you wind up in your neighbors website. Just kidding but it will keep going forever. I would like to see the info in the exif box cleaned up a little though. For me Date taken, digitized and modified are all the same. Also like mentioned earlier there are only a few lines of info I usually look at F stop, Aperture, ISO and flash. Maybe those values could be highlighted or a different color. One more thing in the camera info. There is a line for camera which in my case says Canon. Then there is the line model which says Canon EOS 20D. Could you make that simply one line reading Camera Make/Model?

I like the arrow key navigation. Right & left work great. Up & down I'm not so sure about. I usually like to center the image using the up & down arrows then start moving through the gallery with the right & left arrows. As it is now the up & down keys both scroll the window and move between images at the same time.

I'm really loving these improvements. Can't wait for them to go live!

cjyphoto

Just thought of something else. While navigating using the arrows I came to an image I wanted to view the large image and thought it would be cool if I could just hit the "L" key. Would that be doable? Of course the S M O keys could also be used to do the same thing.

{JT}

You must not have tried using shift+arrow left/right - it changes the page you are on.

Also, we fixed the window scrolling when you use the up and down arrows - it should go out to the beta site soon.

wellman wrote:

Couple of comments on the behavior of the arrow keys...

1. I'm not sure if AJAX apps can handle combined keystrokes, but something like a shift-arrow or a ctrl-arrow (or command-arrow, of course ) would be neat for jumping between gallery pages lickety-spilt.
2. Regarding the up/down arrows. I loved them at first, but now I'm a bit mixed. When I first used them, I was working on a desktop machine with a nice big monitor and a nice big browser window. The entire gallery page was showing up within the browser window, so using up/down seemed just as natural as using left/right. However, this morning, when using my 1024x768 laptop, I couldn't see the the bottom of the main image when a gallery loaded. I hit the down arrow out of habit, and instead of scrolling my browser, the picture changed (of course). That was irksome to have to go back to the touchpad to scroll the window. I'm not sure what the answer is - just reporting my experience.

Thanks again for all the work you guys have done on this. I know I'm posting a bunch - mostly because I was dying to see you implement something like this and I'm so stoked that it's here!

{JT}

The entire exifbox has id tags so you can customize this using CSS for your site. If you want to edit it for every smugmug site you visit, you could create a global css file for firefox/safari to use (I think ie7 has this now, but did not confirm).

cjyphoto wrote:

As far as the "exif/photo details" I like it. I noticed if you drag the exif box to the right you wind up in your neighbors website. Just kidding but it will keep going forever. I would like to see the info in the exif box cleaned up a little though. For me Date taken, digitized and modified are all the same. Also like mentioned earlier there are only a few lines of info I usually look at F stop, Aperture, ISO and flash. Maybe those values could be highlighted or a different color. One more thing in the camera info. There is a line for camera which in my case says Canon. Then there is the line model which says Canon EOS 20D. Could you make that simply one line reading Camera Make/Model?

I like the arrow key navigation. Right & left work great. Up & down I'm not so sure about. I usually like to center the image using the up & down arrows then start moving through the gallery with the right & left arrows. As it is now the up & down keys both scroll the window and move between images at the same time.

I'm really loving these improvements. Can't wait for them to go live!

{JT}

Allen, could you tell me what browser and version you are using? I thought I had this fixed already.

Allen wrote:

I hate to bring this up but the most flustrating thing about the current
right/left arrow navigation hack is when in the edit caption or edit gallery
description boxes. Hit either arrow and it jumps to a different photo
and you'd lose all your edits.

I am completey against this if it's not disabled when in an edit box.
Got so feed up with losing edits I disabled the hack.
Al

wellman

{JT} wrote:

You must not have tried using shift+arrow left/right - it changes the page you are on.

Also, we fixed the window scrolling when you use the up and down arrows - it should go out to the beta site soon.

Guilty as charged. Works a treat!

I've thought about the issue overnight, I'd like to officially vote that the up/down arrows be left alone for scrolling.

encosion

Flyout over the image: Not a fan... I just don't get why anyone would want to put anything in front of their photos! Doesn't make sense... Perhaps for a pop-culture site like Flickr it'd be ok... But for a seriously professional site like this - let the photos be displayed in all their glory... So yeah... I don't see what was so terrible about the links just under images... Perhaps you should create a collapsable box in that area? Docked... And I if for some reason people want the persistant floating EXIF window, they can click on a "release" icon... So you have a docked, collapsed and floating state...

I agree with the photo ranking comment... I think it should be visible all the time... Just under the image on the left or right spring to mind as a decent location...

I find these popups, flyouts and floating windows have a bit of lag associated with them... So if someone's not concentrating / moving too fast, they're going to miss it! And that's coming from my own experience on a pretty damn fast 4 x G5 mac with oodles of RAM (2.5Gb)...

The persistent EXIF "window" jumps around... I think it's taking it's positional cues from image to image based on how many pixels it is from the bottom of the browser window... This is a minor issue, 'cos if you're switching between portrait and landscape images you may need to scroll the window a little to fit in the difference... And then the EXIF window will suddenly jump up over the image... Or if some images don't have EXIF data, the window resizes downwards... I'm not sure if this is coming across clearly... Play around with it...

And to answer the question about why I didn't see the images links / EXIF stuff the first time round... They've been renamed... I was looking for the word EXIF... And the Save Photo icon is new... It used to be text, and used to be filed under "Other sizes"... I think there was some logic behind that approach and think you should maybe swap "Photo Sizes" and "Photo Info" around on the new design... Maybe even get rid of the dividing line between "Photo Sizes" and the Save Icon...

Obviously these are just my opinions... But I do work with stuff for a living so it's not coming out of nowhere... Cheers!

Allen

{JT} wrote:

Allen, could you tell me what browser and version you are using? I thought I had this fixed already.

This was some time ago with FF but not on the new beta site. It was
just a FYI for future design and I think Mike is aware of it said it should
be ok.
Al

bwg

encosion wrote:

The persistent EXIF "window" jumps around... I think it's taking it's positional cues from image to image based on how many pixels it is from the bottom of the browser window... This is a minor issue, 'cos if you're switching between portrait and landscape images you may need to scroll the window a little to fit in the difference... And then the EXIF window will suddenly jump up over the image... Or if some images don't have EXIF data, the window resizes downwards... I'm not sure if this is coming across clearly... Play around with it...

the exif popup should only move when the window resizes or if you've positioned it off the screen somewhere, it'll reposition itself back on the screen when you switch photos. Are you seeing something different?

gallery link and browser would help too.

DJKennedy

Question on the flyouts - I would hope that they will NOT perform their fly out duties on images other than in the galleries - example being: slideshow images on the front page....?

Don't recall reading this anywhere...

Andy

DJKennedy wrote:

Question on the flyouts - I would hope that they will NOT perform their fly out duties on images other than in the galleries - example being: slideshow images on the front page....?

Don't recall reading this anywhere...

They won't.

Allen

Filenames
I turned on file names and it was there below pic. Added a caption and now can't find the filename.
Al
http://atsmithbeta.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/76/1/2886#2886

bwg

Allen wrote:

I turned on file names and it was there below pic. Added a caption and now can't find the filename.
Al
http://atsmithbeta.beta.smugmug.net/gallery/76/1/2886#2886

Allen, thats the way it is supposed to work. Filenames only show if you dont have captions.

The description of that option in the customize gallery screen says "for photos without captions, show the filename instead of nothing?"

Allen

bigwebguy wrote:

Allen, thats the way it is supposed to work. Filenames only show if you dont have captions.

The description of that option in the customize gallery screen says "for photos without captions, show the filename instead of nothing?"

Is this new to the beta site only because it's not that way at the regular
site. Filename is listed in #imageInfo below (#detailsFileName .photoDetail) if
turned on whether there's a caption or not.

You're right about the statement under customize gallery. But it doesn't
work that way on the regular site. Both filename and caption are active.
Al

Scala

It looks like there's no way to see the filename if a caption has been written. That would be a problem when trying to find the photo on my computer. How about adding the filename to the photo info listing?

Allen

Any chance of getting #displayPhoto centered by default?
Portaits are left justified.
Al

Allen

Scala wrote:

It looks like there's no way to see the filename if a caption has been written. That would be a problem when trying to find the photo on my computer. How about adding the filename to the photo info listing?

Same here, I also use the filename to find the photo. Also anyone referring
to which photo would have a problem if I had 30 photos captioned "Mom".
Al

wellman

Allen wrote:

Any chance of getting #displayPhoto centered by default?
Portaits are left justified.
Al

I could be wrong, but I think that's the way it's always been. It's a theme-level thing. I know portraits are centered in a few of the themes.

Allen

wellman wrote:

I could be wrong, but I think that's the way it's always been. It's a theme-level thing. I know portraits are centered in a few of the themes.

You're right it's about 50/50 centered in different themes.
Al

bwg

Allen wrote:

Is this new to the beta site only because it's not that way at the regular
site. Filename is listed in #imageInfo below (#detailsFileName .photoDetail) if
turned on whether there's a caption or not.

You're right about the statement under customize gallery. But it doesn't
work that way on the regular site. Both filename and caption are active.
Al

ok, so you're talking about the filename here and not in the caption area?

Allen

bigwebguy wrote:

ok, so you're talking about the filename here and not in the caption area?

Ya got it. I tryed to display it but couldn't figure the CSS.

{JT}

No CSS involved, this is a oversite. If you have filenames enabled it should show up in the EXIF box, I will fix it.

Allen wrote:

Ya got it. I tryed to display it but couldn't figure the CSS.

encosion

BenA2 wrote:

The "problem" I think you're running into is this: Many of us are still very used to the constraints of Web 1.0. They are now ingrained in our intuition about how the internet works. So, as you add these cutting edge features, it's going to take some time for people to think outside the box (quite literally). Despite my earlier posts, the more I think about it, I'm not sure you should expend too much effort leading people to some of these features. I think it's really a matter of education and time. Eventually, we'll all just expect things to work like fancy, dragable, persistent windows.

Agreed, I'd recommend highlighting and explaining the new features on launch or in a help screen... Cluttering the screen with a "Hover over the image for more information" or other visual cues would be redundant as soon as the user involved "gets it"... A similar cookie based reminder may be a useful thing for the first few months though...

mkress65 wrote:

What about [page up] and [page down] to move between gallery pages and [home] and [end] to go to the first gallery page and last gallery page?

These are used cross browser already too unfortunately... I'm going to vote that the way you've got it working is great, just remove the up and down arrow addition... On my machine when you use them, the image changes AND the screen scrolls... Same with the Shift-Right/Left Arrow key combo - The gallery page changes, but it also does a Shift-highlight of the content of the page (from where you last clicked on the screen)...

bigwebguy wrote:

the exif popup should only move when the window resizes or if you've positioned it off the screen somewhere, it'll reposition itself back on the screen when you switch photos. Are you seeing something different?

I'm not resizing the browser window... Just scrolling up or down a little to better see the main image... It is related to being positioned a little offscreen... I think if you could get it to be persistent to where you put it on the page (I.E. Let part of it go off screen without automagically re-positioning on image change) it would be preferable...

Personally, I still like the way it currently displays on the non-beta site... I think it's pretty discrete... It could be improved... And I believe that improvement comes from giving the end user flexibility... I'd propose the following:

Having three states:

1)



2)



3)

A popped-out mode similar to the current persistent window but with and added "Dock Icon" just before the Close Button...

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FireFox 2.0 : OS X 10.4.8 : 4x2.5 GHz PowerPC G5 : 2.5 GB DDR2 SDRAM
http://encosion.beta.smugmug.net/