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SM-style gallery experience as a content block
thenickdude
Registered Users Posts: 1,302 Major grins
Hi everyone,
When I went to Japan, I went on lots of trips where the day's shooting produced many photos all concentrated a certain topic (e.g. Yoshimine-dera temple, or the Sapporo Snow Festival), and these are a perfect fit to create a gallery each for.
But sometimes I only get 5-10 photos of one subject. In this case, it seems a waste to force people to navigate to my Japan index, decide on and click on a gallery based on one thumbnail, just to see those 5-10 photos. The viewer would then have to figure out how to navigate back and try again if they want to see a different subject.
One way of solving this problem is to create a page with a couple of Multiple Photos blocks set to thumbnails. This way, you can see many short subjects at a glance, and switching between them only requires scrolling which is fast and intuitive.
There's one more friction that I want to remove, though. When I observe people browsing my site (like my parents), I find that they would rather pick and choose which photos they see, instead of viewing all of them sequentially. This means that they have to repeatedly open and close the lightbox (which is extra slow because they don't use keyboard shortcuts to close it and must click the "X" which is a very small target).
SmugMug-style galleries allow viewers to rapidly pick new photos with a single click, by avoiding the Lightbox. If the Multiple Photos block supported a style similar to the SmugMug gallery, I could create a page with many Multiple Photos blocks, which cover many small subjects, and would be quick and easy to browse.
This is my idea of what it might look like:
And this is a live demo on my website that you can try out:
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Japan/Various
When I went to Japan, I went on lots of trips where the day's shooting produced many photos all concentrated a certain topic (e.g. Yoshimine-dera temple, or the Sapporo Snow Festival), and these are a perfect fit to create a gallery each for.
But sometimes I only get 5-10 photos of one subject. In this case, it seems a waste to force people to navigate to my Japan index, decide on and click on a gallery based on one thumbnail, just to see those 5-10 photos. The viewer would then have to figure out how to navigate back and try again if they want to see a different subject.
One way of solving this problem is to create a page with a couple of Multiple Photos blocks set to thumbnails. This way, you can see many short subjects at a glance, and switching between them only requires scrolling which is fast and intuitive.
There's one more friction that I want to remove, though. When I observe people browsing my site (like my parents), I find that they would rather pick and choose which photos they see, instead of viewing all of them sequentially. This means that they have to repeatedly open and close the lightbox (which is extra slow because they don't use keyboard shortcuts to close it and must click the "X" which is a very small target).
SmugMug-style galleries allow viewers to rapidly pick new photos with a single click, by avoiding the Lightbox. If the Multiple Photos block supported a style similar to the SmugMug gallery, I could create a page with many Multiple Photos blocks, which cover many small subjects, and would be quick and easy to browse.
This is my idea of what it might look like:
And this is a live demo on my website that you can try out:
http://www.sherlockphotography.org/Japan/Various
https://www.sherlockphotography.org/
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
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This is very cool idea - I like very much how you have the thumbnails scroll left/right. Did you implement this scrolling using options available in the customizer? Or this is achieved with custom CSS only? Thank you very much.
You could duplicate the scrolling thumbnails using pure CSS but it would be a lot of code... Maybe I'll give that a try anyway.
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Thanks a bunch!
I'm currently working on a CSS generator that will create a widget like this on the page!
Please check out my gallery of customisations for the New SmugMug, more to come!
Lamah, thank you for your hard work - I truly hope it becomes a usable feature!
Cheers,
Sara
Personally, I really dislike browsing photos in a filmstrip style. It is totally a matter of preference and taste. For my own galleries, I might prefer it to slide the thumbnails over to the left and group them in a traditional "SmugMug" style while open, leaving the rows of other galleries in place above and below the content block. I would have to play with it to be sure if that is an improvement for my own totally biased purposes.
In terms of usability, I found myself wanting to be able to collapse a gallery after I had browsed it (or changed my mind about browsing it). I know that opening a photo from a different gallery collapses the original one, but I wanted to go back and browse the whole page again.
Clever idea, nice work.
Nicholas IE Lamah the type of things your able to do with smugmug amazes me but then again I know nothing when it comes to java and the type of work you do. I mostly copy and paste haha. Though it looks like you got "Baldy's" attention so maybe this will be added. I think to have the option would be sweet whether or not I'd use I don't know but Its a great idea!
http://www.k-ophotography.com/