The musician sayd : “It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength & freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten

To continue the analogy, I think you could say the image just provides the score, but the performance is up to the viewer — how their eye moves over the image will determine how the song gets played. The eye tracking studies show that people look at the same image in very different ways if, say, they are given certain task when looking at the image. As that song plays out, the viewer ends up with that song playing — it might be soothing and harmonious, or jarring and chaotic. As an image creator I can do try to make the score easier or harder to play, but the end performance is out of my hands. Analogy aside, as the eye tracks through the image, the brain must process the undulating changes in tone. The stronger the image hierarchy, the more viewers that will process it in a similar fashion and get a similar experience.

But I think this happens at a very subconscious level, regardless of whether the viewer is trying to interact with the abstract layer. Certainly artists and photographers and savvy viewers may be a bit more aware of those elements, but I think the song is there for all viewers merely as part of the process of viewing.

In addition to the narrative it provides, the object layer can force the viewer’s mind into a particular context. Which will in turn skew the performance of the song — both by changing the eye tracking, and providing an emotional context to associate it with.

Photographs (or representational paintings) exist on two levels — the level of object, speaking to that part of the brain that recognizes and categorizes things; “that is a picture of a crack-pipe.” If you put that object into other contexts, you get narrative. “why is it lying in a puddle in the street? Where is the crackhead who was smoking it?”

At another level, c’est ne pas une crack pipe; it’s a series of tones on a paper that form a composition — this is the abstraction layer. Every artist or photographer spends most of his time dealing with this layer, and you could suggest that the most saavy viewers do as well.

But most people refuse to interact with the abstraction layer in visual arts.

Why is this? Because our eyes are our primary identifier? Because we want to use vision to organize and categorize our world?

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.

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?

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.