Upcoming Lightbox improvements (2019 edition)

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  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins

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    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
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  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins

    leftquark mentioned they might have a way to minimize the scroll bar that shows with taller sidebar
    in Firefox so the "xx" items might not be needed.
    Hope so but I still like the corner radius's on photo.

      /* add small space from scroll bar to photo */
    .sm-lightbox-v2-content .sm-lightbox-v2-photo {
       xx margin-left: 15px!important;
       xx width: 98%!important;  /* shrink photo so right side shows */
       xx height: auto;
        border-radius: 8px;}
    

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • hadronhadron Registered Users Posts: 95 Big grins

    @leftquark said:

    If you turn off “Show Photo Info” in Gallery Settings, then the sidebar should display just the Title, Caption and Keywords. You can also select if Title, Caption, and Keywords are displayed via the Customization settings.

    Would it be possible have a Site Wide option to turn off "Show Photo Info"? This would help immensely so I don't have to set this option in all of my many old gallery settings. In other words I don't want my Guests to ever see Photo Info throughout my whole site.

  • AllenAllen Registered Users Posts: 10,008 Major grins

    Going into Lightbox I still do not see any obvious indications for captions, etc.
    How about a "one time event", first time in, showing a note on the overlay?
    This would only show in the first view of overlay. Perhaps saved in cookie.
    Couple quick flashes then steady.

    Al - Just a volunteer here having fun
    My Website index | My Blog
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    I wipped up some quick CSS to add a "READ MORE..." text underneath the title, to let the user know they can click to read the caption. This isn't anything official, though I do plan on asking the design team to see if they can make an improvement for everyone to help in this regards.

    See the thread here for the CSS: https://dgrin.com/discussion/comment/2097210/#Comment_2097210

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    @hadron said:
    Would it be possible have a Site Wide option to turn off "Show Photo Info"? This would help immensely so I don't have to set this option in all of my many old gallery settings. In other words I don't want my Guests to ever see Photo Info throughout my whole site.

    Within the Organizer you can select multiple galleries and then click "Settings" to edit them in Bulk. You can also click on your root (home) folder in the Organizer and clicking on "Settings" will allow you to update the settings for your entire. Lastly, you can do this on individual folders and have it apply to all the galleries in it, with a similar process.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • RonvanderPlasRonvanderPlas Registered Users Posts: 22 Big grins
    Hi, maybe I'm mistaking but do I understand that captions won't be displayed by default and the user has to click a button to show? And that it takes 1/3 of the screen to show a caption?
    I have a few thousand photos, flowers, bugs, butterflies, mushrooms etc. where we show the caption for info which flower or butterfly the visitor sees. I will be very inconvenient if the visitor has to click with every photo to see the caption.
    I also tested the slideshow and there are also no captions visible.
    Please say this is not true or give a setting to display the caption under the photo by default. The main reason why I chose SmugMug is because of the rich feature set. Not because it's simple where other online services are.
  • FergusonFerguson Registered Users Posts: 1,339 Major grins
    edited August 11, 2019

    @leftquark said:
    I wipped up some quick CSS to add a "READ MORE..." text underneath the title, to let the user know they can click to read the caption. This isn't anything official, though I do plan on asking the design team to see if they can make an improvement for everyone to help in this regards.

    image

    See the thread here for the CSS: https://dgrin.com/discussion/comment/2097210/#Comment_2097210

    So... how about instead, you put the caption there and hidden, so people can use CSS if desired to make it not hidden. Then the global Smugmug gets the vision you had of what it should look like, and those few trouble makers like me who want the caption shown can still do it?

    That's not to say your effort is not appreciated, just... well, I think the Caption should simply be there. I get it that you (and your design team) do not. But I think there's more than one of us out here who do. How much could a hidden caption hurt?

  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    The message of "we want it to be really easy for our visitors to know a caption exists and read it" has been heard loud and clear. While we may not implement the solution exactly as a particular person here suggests, it is an outcome I want to make sure we are solving for. It's a problem to us if your visitors aren't able to read the story.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • FergusonFerguson Registered Users Posts: 1,339 Major grins
    edited August 11, 2019

    I guess what is puzzling me is that emphasis on enjoying the full impact of the image, and not wanting to spoil that at all, but then taking up a third of the space (sometimes) with the info pane to see it. I don't want to lose all that space to see the caption.

    I did a quick test in debug mode where I set up a vertical screen about cell phone size, then looked at first a landscape shot, then a portrait shot. The landscape wasn't bad, it just shifted up.

    Like this:

    But the vertical shot was awful. Here's the original:

    And when you hit "info" the image is about half or 60% the original size, a lot of impact lost.

    Now to be fair I didn't even have caption on these. :(

    I tried it on a cell phone and it was slightly different, with larger fonts and more of the info off the screen below, but info still took up a huge part of the screen and the image shrunk a lot.

    I just can't see how that experience is better, to see captions, than showing them over the image.

    And the idea of hiding ALL the other info except caption (if indeed that would reduce the info area size?) doesn't work well for me either, as I want people to be able to see time of day, or shooting info if they happen to be photographers.

    I saw some comment elsewhere about something like

    Watch as your workflow changes as a result of it (which should be for the better).

    If that's supposed to mean we should re-do how we use Title and Caption based on Smugmug -- that's awfully presumptuous of Smugmug, to think we should do metadata coding aimed specifically for Smugmug. Maybe for some Smugmug is the be-all-end-all destination for their work, and they can and will code metadata entirely to suit its design. (Though even there, what about thousands of images coded already?) Maybe I'm unusual to think that my workflow, which serves other purposes, should stay the same, and your display should have options that allow your customers to ... pun intended... customize to fit their work. After all, customers... you know, the people who send you money?

    You guys are starting to sound like Apple -- telling the customers what they should like, and basically saying "learn to like it". OK, maybe a bad example, since Apple is ... well, gigantic and successful and growing... but I use an Android for that reason.

  • hadronhadron Registered Users Posts: 95 Big grins
    edited August 15, 2019

    Within the Organizer you can select multiple galleries and then click "Settings" to edit them in Bulk. You can also click on your root (home) folder in the Organizer and clicking on "Settings" will allow you to update the settings for your entire. Lastly, you can do this on individual folders and have it apply to all the galleries in it, with a similar process.

    Unfortunately some settings are NOT available where you describe. For example, the "Quick Settings" available in the Gallery Settings (and others), are not available - especially when multiple galleries are selected.

    If you are aware of a way to apply a specific Quick Setting to ALL site galleries, please let me know.

  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    @hadron: Nearly all of the settings are available via Bulk Settings, though Quick Settings are not, as well as some specific password related items since all galleries should use different passwords.

    Otherwise you can go in and choose the settings that your quick-setting would normally apply, and apply those in bulk to your entire site. You can see here how I've chosen to set all my galleries in my entire site to have Camera Info OFF, filenames on, slideshow/map off, sorted by Date Taken, etc. If I hit "save", all my galleries will now get those settings, across my entire account.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins
    edited August 16, 2019
    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • mbg71mbg71 Registered Users Posts: 9 Big grins

    Chiming in with my dismay about the slideshow changes. This is not something I was expecting when I read that the lightbox was being updated.

    In my case, I spend a lot of time writing captions, and I set up my galleries with the expectation that they will be viewed as slideshows with visible captions. I liked the caption display in the old slideshow -- it had a good balance of prominence and legibility.

    There is a lightbox setting to turn captions (and titles) on and off. Perhaps this could be honoured in the slideshow view?

  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    @mbg71 said:
    Chiming in with my dismay about the slideshow changes. This is not something I was expecting when I read that the lightbox was being updated.

    In my case, I spend a lot of time writing captions, and I set up my galleries with the expectation that they will be viewed as slideshows with visible captions. I liked the caption display in the old slideshow -- it had a good balance of prominence and legibility.

    There is a lightbox setting to turn captions (and titles) on and off. Perhaps this could be honoured in the slideshow view?

    Thanks for your feedback -- it's important to let us know how you'd like your photos to be presented. I'll pass this along to the team so I'm not the only one reading the feedback.

    I'll double-check but I believe we had intended to honor that setting. Stay tuned.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    @mbg71 said:
    In my case, I spend a lot of time writing captions, and I set up my galleries with the expectation that they will be viewed as slideshows with visible captions. I liked the caption display in the old slideshow -- it had a good balance of prominence and legibility.

    I, too, write long stories about my photos. In the old style I hated that the captions covered my photo, which meant my visitors didn't get a great experience looking at the photos NOR a great experience reading the story. When you want the photo and the caption to be displayed, what experience are you expecting?

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • hadronhadron Registered Users Posts: 95 Big grins

    Holy cow. I found out about the new lightbox going live by visiting my own site. And without any of the Caption changes discussed in this thread. NOT GOOD! I thought SM was far out with the new LB release.

  • Hikin' MikeHikin' Mike Registered Users Posts: 5,448 Major grins
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    @hadron said:
    Holy cow. I found out about the new lightbox going live by visiting my own site. And without any of the Caption changes discussed in this thread. NOT GOOD! I thought SM was far out with the new LB release.

    I've been mentioning here that we were close, and the Customization discussion mentioned it would be coming out in the next week or so.

    The caption discussion is a discussion. We're taking feedback but there's a lot more feedback to gather than a few folks who found this dgrin thread. We're letting this get out in the wild, gathering how it's being used, and then will make improvements from there.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins

    @Hikin' Mike said:
    I'm not seeing titles or captions in the new lightbox.

    Could you share a link? I see captions and keywords on your photos when I just looked.

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • Hikin' MikeHikin' Mike Registered Users Posts: 5,448 Major grins

    @leftquark said:
    Could you share a link? I see captions and keywords on your photos when I just looked.

    Odd. I tried both Chrome and FF and they were not there earlier. I came back when you said you could see them, and I can see them now.

  • mbg71mbg71 Registered Users Posts: 9 Big grins

    @leftquark said:
    I, too, write long stories about my photos. In the old style I hated that the captions covered my photo, which meant my visitors didn't get a great experience looking at the photos NOR a great experience reading the story. When you want the photo and the caption to be displayed, what experience are you expecting?

    As I said, I liked the caption display in the old slideshow. A small part of the full-screen view of the photo is obscured by the caption, but it's on the edge and doesn't disturb too much. I prefer this to a smaller photo leaving space for a separate caption.

    Also, the effort I've expended in writing captions has often been in distilling things down to a short sentence that does not take too much space or too long to read.

  • RonvanderPlasRonvanderPlas Registered Users Posts: 22 Big grins
    edited August 16, 2019

    Hi, I don't see any titles nor captions in my slideshows on the tablet/mobile browser. What is the setting for displaying title in slideshows on my tablet/phone?

    Edit: A few minutes later they show up.....

    Ieks, it's a bit confusing. When manualy sliding through the photo's the title is there but having an automatic slideshow does not display them. Showing the title would be very useful for visitors. Please honour the gallery setting that titles are shown also in the automatic slideshow.

  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins
    edited August 16, 2019

    @RonvanderPlas said:
    Hi, I don't see any titles nor captions in my slideshows. How can I at least make the title visible? Before the change there was a decent gray bar at the foot of the photo where the title (and caption) were displayed nicely. What is the setting for displaying title in slideshows?

    At the moment we've disabled slideshows from displaying the caption since most photographers use the slideshow as a way to show off their photos and your visitors told us the caption blocked their ability to really enjoy the photo. I'm keeping track of all the feedback from folks that would like to be able to show captions on their slideshows -- what's your expectation for how the captions and slideshows work together?

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • RonvanderPlasRonvanderPlas Registered Users Posts: 22 Big grins

    @leftquark said:
    At the moment we've disabled slideshows from displaying the caption

    I'm especially talking about the title also not showing. Those are mostly short texts and don't disturb to much. I do understand you don't want the captions to be there but title....?
    I'm currently in the flow of moving all my captions to the titles field (a few thousand..) but it would nice for my (not a professional selling photographer) if the visitors of our site can see the titles in my slideshows.

  • leftquarkleftquark Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 3,784 Many Grins
    edited August 16, 2019

    @RonvanderPlas said:

    @leftquark said:
    At the moment we've disabled slideshows from displaying the caption

    I'm especially talking about the title also not showing. Those are mostly short texts and don't disturb to much. I do understand you don't want the captions to be there but title....?
    I'm currently in the flow of moving all my captions to the titles field (a few thousand..) but it would nice for my (not a professional selling photographer) if the visitors of our site can see the titles in my slideshows.

    Yep - the decision for this was mostly driven by non-Pro's visitors who said they like to read the storytelling at a different time from enjoying the photos.

    Can you tell me more about what you'd like your viewers to see/learn while playing a slideshow?

    dGrin Afficionado
    Former SmugMug Product Team
    aaron AT aaronmphotography DOT com
    Website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com
    My SmugMug CSS Customizations website: http://www.aaronmphotography.com/Customizations
  • RonvanderPlasRonvanderPlas Registered Users Posts: 22 Big grins

    @leftquark said:

    Can you tell me more about what you'd like your viewers to see/learn while playing a slideshow?

    Before the change there was a nice transparant gray bar at the bottom of the photo with the title. That''s enough. Maybe a setting in the lightbox setting 'Slideshow titles'. Which makes titles show in the slideshow.

  • sarasphotossarasphotos Registered Users Posts: 3,822 Major grins

    a) I'm pretty dismayed that there is no map - when is it expected to arrive? (or have I just not found it?)

    b) Joining the chorus of those disgruntled by the lack of information (title/caption) in the slideshow. Even if SM thinks it's "better" to have the slideshow without text - I pay for the service, don't I get to decide what's better for me??? This should be an available option that I could turn on without having to resort to too much customization.

    c) Is / will there be a css hack to turn off the line "from galleryxxx" in a smart gallery? I seem to remember there used to be such a thing and for years I had this text turned off.

    d) As my captions are NOT book-length texts I would like to have them show over or underneath the photo without an extra click being required. Happy to use custom css.

    e) Here's pretty much what I would like to see when someone clicks on the Info button: title, caption, copyright (optional), filename (optional), very basic camera info, location and map. Sort of like this from another service provider:

  • kyllitedrekyllitedre Registered Users Posts: 24 Big grins

    Am i missing something or the ONLY option for a visitor to see all photo details (especially title, caption, keywords (like it used to be), and filename (thank you for that finally!!!) is to click on that icon? Please tell me it's not true and I'm not in the middle of a nightmare?

    In addition, I added CSS to the theme (tweak no 8) to put title under the photo instead of it being all over it (extremely disturbing and/or not visible at all) and now, allthough it looks better, i only see half of it, since the bottom half is hidden under browser's edge...

  • kyllitedrekyllitedre Registered Users Posts: 24 Big grins

    In addition, I added CSS to the theme (tweak no 8) to put title under the photo instead of it being all over it (extremely disturbing and/or not visible at all) and now, allthough it looks better, i only see half of it, since the bottom half is hidden under browser's edge...

    EDIT: this only happens when one adds suggested custom CSS to add extra space around photo.

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