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Problem loading large "Collage Landscape" galleries
zubenelgenubi
Registered Users Posts: 67 Big grins
Hi,
I have settled on Smugmug's "Collage Landscape" gallery style as the one that both looks best and works properly with the various customizations that I like to use. But lately I've noticed a problem with using it to display large galleries. (Example: http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/Events/EquinoxMarathon2013).
At least with my Firefox browser, clicking on a thumbnail does not bring up the lightbox display of that image until after the entire gallery has loaded. With a slow internet connection and a large gallery this could mean my viewers have to wait for a long time before the thumbnails rendered so far actually become responsive to their browsing attempts. And they probably don't realize that they have to wait - to them it just appears to be broken.
But it's actually worse than this. Again, with a large gallery and a slow connection, there are instances where the gallery NEVER fully loads, so the thumbnails never become responsive to user clicks. The only way I've found to "kick it along" is to keep refreshing the page until all elements do successfully load. Again, a casual user won't know to do this and will just assume they're looking at yet another flakey web site that doesn't work.
This behavior may be specific to Firefox, as that is the only browser I use. In any case, it's not a good look - either for my site or fr smugmug in general. If it were possible to fix the Collage Landscape behavior so that the thumbnails do respond to user clicks as soon as they're rendered, then this would be a far more pleasing and professional behavior. I'm pretty sure the current behavior is very bad for page views and photo sales!
Thanks,
- Mark
I have settled on Smugmug's "Collage Landscape" gallery style as the one that both looks best and works properly with the various customizations that I like to use. But lately I've noticed a problem with using it to display large galleries. (Example: http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/Events/EquinoxMarathon2013).
At least with my Firefox browser, clicking on a thumbnail does not bring up the lightbox display of that image until after the entire gallery has loaded. With a slow internet connection and a large gallery this could mean my viewers have to wait for a long time before the thumbnails rendered so far actually become responsive to their browsing attempts. And they probably don't realize that they have to wait - to them it just appears to be broken.
But it's actually worse than this. Again, with a large gallery and a slow connection, there are instances where the gallery NEVER fully loads, so the thumbnails never become responsive to user clicks. The only way I've found to "kick it along" is to keep refreshing the page until all elements do successfully load. Again, a casual user won't know to do this and will just assume they're looking at yet another flakey web site that doesn't work.
This behavior may be specific to Firefox, as that is the only browser I use. In any case, it's not a good look - either for my site or fr smugmug in general. If it were possible to fix the Collage Landscape behavior so that the thumbnails do respond to user clicks as soon as they're rendered, then this would be a far more pleasing and professional behavior. I'm pretty sure the current behavior is very bad for page views and photo sales!
Thanks,
- Mark
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Comments
We'll dig into this to see what we can find. I tried myself in this gallery, using Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but didn't notice any lag or wait in the lightbox image being displayed. Even when clicking very quickly after opening the gallery, the lightbox was up quickly as well. I did ask other Heroes to test as well, and one did experience what you've described, that the lightbox had to wait for thumbs to load.
We'll take a look, thank you for bringing this to our attention! Could you please try troubleshooting on another browser like Chrome and Safari, to confirm whether you do see the same behavior? Also, what operating system are you using, like Mac or PC?
The SmugMug gallery style may be helpful in this situation, and particularly with shots of so many people, it may be easier for them to navigate and find their photos. You'd have pages of thumbs to look through, but the main image on the right will help in identifying photos and the lightbox still gives a larger single-image view.
If you need anything else, please let us know.
Take care,
Wendee
SmugMug Support Hero
http://help.smugmug.com/
I now think the issue is associated with recent versions of Firefox. I have only really noticed it in the last few weeks or so I'd guess; before that I had no concerns about how my pages load. I tried looking at my galleries using an older machine running Firefox 26.0 under Windows XP, and the thumbnals were immediately responsive, even before the whole gallery loaded. Also, on my newer Win7 laptop I find the thumbnails respond immediately when I use Internet Explorer. But with Firefox 29.0.1 on the Wn7 machine the thumbnails aren't responsive until everything loads. I stopped using Chrome for routine browsing because it had issues with some of the sites I use, so I'm not sure how it handles the Collage Landscape galleries.
So I suppose it's not as bad as I first thought - only a fraction of users will see the issue. Even so, it is annoying for me, because the bug does apply to the machines that I use most frequently.
Thanks,
- Mark
P.S. - I have drifted away from using the "Smugmug" gallery style, because I find that on most machines that I use it's page layout engine doesn't fill enough of the screen with the photos. At least for my taste, there's too much wasted space and not enough photo area. I tried tweaking it, but never got the photos to fill the screen fully enough to keep me happy. It may be hard to come up with a fill algorithm that uses all the screen, but in any case I think "Collage landscape" looks better.
Cheers, Sara