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General Support: Let the customizing begin ...

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    • CommentAuthorjack
    • CommentTimeSep 12th 2005
     
    "I can honestly say that I am glad to have gotten this out of the way, the self-imposed pressure was starting to get to me."...

    That's what I read on the Solano site, and therefore I really think this beta should have been launched sooner. Not for us users, but for the developers. It's a beta, so let the "world" play with it and give feedback. It seems to me the developers have been trying to make the beta too good :). Perfectionists? :)

    Anyway, I downloaded and began installing/upgrading my testsite. Everything seems to be working just fine and it all looks great! My compliments to how it works, how it looks and feels! It's already really solid!

    But as with the first beta there are two things that haven't been changed and I know already that those were choices made by the developers, and I respect that. But here in this forum I'd like to mention them once more in the hope they will be made possible as an option in the future. And if not I really would like some help in customizing, because in the end it comes to how images are presented to the viewer the best possible way:

    1. Option for normal sized thumnails. If a picture is rectangular, the thumb should also be rectangular. Ever seen a stockphoto or photographers site that crops its images? This would mean that the thumbs should be given a maximum height or width, just like Gallery does it, or this man who is creating a gallery plugin for wordpress: http://blogs.hiveworks.com/msa/galleries/wedding/

    2. Option to skip the intermediate picture. The thumb should then open a popup window that shows the larger image. This way people can always view the images (especially the vertical ones) complete and without scrolling. Scrolling through text is fine and natural, but not a picture!

    Hope this will be possible :).
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      CommentAuthormike
    • CommentTimeSep 13th 2005
     
    Jack,

    Thanks for all your input. Your observation is indeed correct, perfectionism runs cold through my blood. Unfortunately for me, perfection is completely unattainable and ultimately leads to self-defeat. Well, anyway, Beta 2 is out there and it is definitely not perfect! Between backpacking Europe for a month, working a full-time job, and having a full-time girlfriend, releasing it any earlier just wasn't feasible

    As for your suggestions... Plogger does retain the option for normal sized thumbnails, they just aren't aligned exactly how you described. Just uncheck "Use Square Thumbnails?". There are many reasons for this that I don't care to go into right now, but just know many hours were spent trying to get the effect you described in your emails. If you can get it to work, I'd love to see your code :)

    To me, cropping the thumbnails really doesn't take away from the integrity of the gallery at all. A thumbnail is meant to be a preview, even a teaser, for a larger image. There is no reason why a cropped thumbnail would take away from the "artistic integrity" of a stock photographer or an artist. A thumbnail needn't be a full representation of the entire image, just enough to make the user want to click on the image and see it in its full representation.

    As for you second suggestion, this is entirely possible and probably really simple to implement. You'll notice that clicking on a thumbnail on the manage page does exactly what you describe. You can go into gallery.php and manually change the picture level links to match these javascript popup links. You will have to copy plog-thumbpopup.php to your Plogger root directory, and maybe some JS code, but I imagine if you have even a basic familiarity with coding you should be able to do this with no problem.

    Again, thanks for your suggestions and kind works. Good luck!
    • CommentAuthorjack
    • CommentTimeSep 14th 2005
     
    I've been playing with plogger for some time now, and I think I got the popups working. :) But now I don't know where to go with my captions :(. They don't fit beneath the thumbs, and it doesn't really look good beneath the larger image in the popup window. I'll have to experiment a bit longer on that.

    A few things that I encounterd during my testing:
    * Option to choose between filename or caption beneath the thumb (filename is rather irrelevant in my opinion, could be the names from the digicam), and make it an option if you want something beneath the thumbs at all?

    * Option to display the 'view as slideshow' button. I know these things can be done by editing the files themselves, but in order to avoid problems when upgrading this could better be something for the 'manage' page. Imho...

    * The function plogger_list_categories($class). Is that a function to be used together with the future wordpress plugin? Because I really like to have a list of the main collections in my sidebar. The albums themselves can be in the content div, but a list of the collections could be an addition to the breadcrumbs.

    As to the square thumbs, I worked with them this afternoon but don't like it myself. I uploaded some images that look a bit alike, and I can keep them apart when I view them as they are, but when cropped ... :( . Also I uploaded some rather uninteresting images, and looking at the square thumbs I noticed that I didn't know what to expect to see after clicking them. And that must be the same for visitors. The subject is not always in the middle of the image.

    Anyway. I won't mention this again I promise, so don't get bored. :), but perhaps you can help me with this then:
    I really really really would like to know how to make the thumbs max. size (either width or height), instead of max height. Then I can go figure out the rest myself (I hope) and replace the <ul><li> code with tables.

    That's it I guess. I don't have need for much more than Plogger already offers. Although there is one little thing. Did I mention the thumbnails?... :)

    Cheers,

    Jack
    • CommentAuthorshirohagen
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2005
     
    I'd like to see a similar thing to one of the comments above. Is it possible to remove the last click, so you see thumbnails, then previews with comments but no largest images as I don't need that sort of detail with what I'm trying to do and it would be nice to keep it simple.

    ®
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      CommentAuthormike
    • CommentTimeSep 16th 2005
     
    Discarding the original source file causes a couple of problems. One, what if you want to change the size of your thumbnails in the future? Plogger will not upsample images, and if you don't have the original you with be SOL. Second, if you degrade the quality of your thumbnails, you won't be able to increase it later.

    It's easy to remove the link to the large images in gallery.php, and if you plan on not changing your thumbnail sizes, ever, then you should be able to delete the images in your plogger/images/ directory. However I don't recommend this, it may corrupt the integrity of your gallery, but it is one solution.

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