Alex Wilson Photography > Blog

Could you find what you were looking for?

Yes. I had no trouble finding the things I wanted to find.

Was navigating between albums easy or hard?

Quite easy–the breadcrumbs at the top made navigating up from a specific choice easy, and navigation from the top down through the menus was also simple. If the hierarchy gets complex enough you may need a solution to move directly from one leaf node to another without tree traversal, but I don’t see that as required for what you have here.

In general, did you like the organization by subject/folder/hierarchy?

Yes. Your classifications seems simple and intuitive.

I did find it jarring that some of the top level items went directly to the image views without a secondary menu after “training” myself by looking at the categories with submenus first, but I don’t think that’s a big deal.

Was navigating inside an album easy or hard?

Very easy for the most part. I was never in any doubt about where a click would take me, or what to click to get to a specific goal.

However in galleries where the images have strong common elements and there are a large number of images–I’m looking at you “Bleached” gallery–the thumbnails become less useful for direct selection. That is, much more brain use is required to find a specific image. The cursor float highlighting really helps with this, though.

Did you mostly change images by clicking the previous/next links, clicking the large image, or clicking the thumbnail images?

Mostly by clicking the thumbnail images. I was foraging for things that interested me in the thumbnails, and then “expanding” those, rather than treating the gallery like a slideshow.

I didn’t realize the large image clicks were navigation until I read this and went back–I had noticed the cursor change over the large images, but I think I was unconsciously expecting a click to take me to a shopping cart for prints or something.

For a gallery with lots more images, would you prefer more albums with a limited number of images in each? Or, if performance was not an issue, would an album with lots of images be okay?

As long as the classifications remain as strong as they currently are, then more albums with fewer images (I think 32 in an album is probably the ideal max with the current layout). This lets me get to a selection of images I’m interested in easily, but with a number that I can easily browse while seeing all the thumbnails.

(As an aside, is it possible with this engine to do a “random” album? That might be cool for the “I don’t know what I’m missing” problem.)

Is there anything you didn’t like, or didn’t make sense?

The only negative was the surprise at the jump directly to images from the top menu after seeing some items with submenus, but that’s hardly a big deal.

Is there anything you really liked and don’t want me to change?

The highlighting of the thumbnails when the cursor passes over them. The breadcrumb trail at the top.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Nope.

Awesome, thanks. That confirmed a lot of what I was thinking.

Interesting that you found the “albums without sub-albums” to be a bit jarring, but I can understand that.

Do you think you’d find it helpful or annoying if it moved page focus back up to the main image after you clicked on a thumb?

I’d have to try it, but my gut says annoying–I’m expecting the clicks to either navigate to a new page or change the main image, but not to move me around within the page.

I’ve made the thumbs on a single (scrollable) line, so that should remove the need for having to jump the page up and down between thumbs and image, unless you have a small monitor and 19 toolbars in your browser.

Also, the thumbs are now their own images (served up thumb-size), instead of the browser requesting just the large image and it resizing the thumbs client-side. While this effectively doubles the number of requests generated by each page visit (the Galleria script aggressively preloads all the large images), it seems to speed up performance. It appears client-side resizing is a not insignificant performance hit.

Both of these mean I can have a few more images in each album without them being quite as unwieldy.

The scrollable thumbs interface isn’t a perfect solution, but I think it solves the nastier issues.

Yes, it looks perfect. I think you moved the scrollable line to the top as well (before was below the picture) and it’s better now. Only problem is that you cannot have the list of pictures and the picture together in the screen and I have to scroll up and down. Perhaps, a suggestion could be to have the list of pictures overlapping the main image and make it appear/disappear when moving the mouse over the picture.
But great gallery and great pictures!!!!