Updated Feature - Slideshows

[yardbird]

Great to see the new additiona to the feature. Unfortunately I am getting an error when I try to run the slideshow. this happens in any gallery. Not only mine.
Again is it something with my machine? I get a runtime error ono Line 35. Null error.
Thanks
Karthik

[bobt54]

I just tried it in IE6 and Firefox and it ran fine. Have you tried dumping the cache?

[yardbird]

Thanks Bob!

[yardbird]

Ok here goes... Now that I have it working I think it works great. I love the simplicity and the transition.

Good things

1. Simple in style and desgin
2. Great transition
3. Good delay options. Easy to use.
4. Keyboard usage excellent idea.
5. Auto resizing according to screen size.

Things that can be improved

1. The slideshow option is hidden in the main gallery. I am guessing this is now the easiest way to view the photos, and thus somehow we need to highlight the slideshow option.
2. During playback, the keyboard options are unknown. We need a way to tell people thay have that option. Maybe a text line above the divider at the bottom.
3. The link at the bottom of the image should default to a new page. Instead of us selecting open in new page.
4. Some claim original sizes should be allowed. I am ok with the way it is.

Things that are bad

I can't think of any.


Cheers
Karthik

[floradoragirl]

I'm sorry, but I hate the transition - perhaps it's just something I've done wrong in the coding in my galleries, but for me, the transition takes so long to load each picture and then move on to the next one that even having it on a 1 second delay means that it will take forever to look at a big gallery. It seems to take more than a second to load a picture and then at least another second or two to clear it off the screen, it seems quite patchy and the way the images come into focus/full visibility gives me eye ache! I liked the first slideshow - don't like the new transitional version.

I'm really hoping it's a bug with my galleries.

[ctstone]

the transition takes so long to load each picture and then move on to the next one that even having it on a 1 second delay means that it will take forever to look at a big gallery. It seems to take more than a second to load a picture and then at least another second or two to clear it off the screen

I viewed one of your galleries and did not witness any glitches. What browser (and version) are you using? Are you on broadband or dial-up?

[floradoragirl]

I viewed one of your galleries and did not witness any glitches. What browser (and version) are you using? Are you on broadband or dial-up?

Chris, I appreciate your speedy response. On that particular machine I'm running Firefox 1.5.04 on Mac OS X.3.9 on a broadband connection. It might be that the machine itself is just too slow to deal with it - right now I'm on the same version of Firefox but running on a Mac OS X.4 and it's much better. *sigh*...must be my machine. Sorry.

[wwcsig]

Very nice feature. Looks awesome!

Now there is still a small buglet when the title of the image contains
html tags (like in most of my galleries). Take a look at my
Yellowstone Gallery http://www.pbase.com/wwcsig/ys.
The titles of the images 'grow' when they are displayed in the
slideshow. The last image title should read:

American White Pelican Pelecanus Erythrorhynchos

but in the slideshow it shows as

American White Pelican <i>Pelecanus Erythrorhynchos</i>Picoides Villosus (immature) (3 of 3)

Thanks for looking into this little 'feature'...

Wolfgang

[janschiphorst]

Thanks for the slideshow possibility, but unfortunately the space between the picture and the buttons (delay, pause) is to big. Also from esthetic viewpoint.

[unclefrank]

Thanks for all the info on the slideshow feature, Chris. It will be a terrific sales tool for my wedding work... particularly if you can tell me how to link some music to it .

My only nit is that I didn't receive an announcement of the upgrade, and there isn't any mention of it on pbase's front page either. After I stumbled across it yesterday, I alerted my threadmates on DPReview and the Nikon Cafe, and only 1 person already knew about the feature. So please pass on my regards to Slug and Emily, and suggest that it might help customer satisfaction (and their revenue stream) if they appoint a volunteer to handle PR.

Warm regards,
Frank

[icholakov]

I wanted to quickly illustrate an issue with the slideshows. I compares two of my galleries, one with photos from a zoo and one with aviation photos. The originals are approximately 960 pix wide. The zoo photos look good in a slideshow because objects are fairly rownd shaped. It does not work well at all on the aviation gallery: each edge on the airplane becomes a rough zigzag because of the sizing down due to their particulat shape with long straight lines and edges. That's to the point where slideshows are unusable for images depicting airplanes. Is there a way to addrezz this?

[dennismullen]

This is the same problem I and others have been complaining about. The default view is large, but all the resized pictures are at a low quality instead of the highest quality setting, as in Photoshop. In my opinion only the original pictures are worth looking at. People do not notice there is an original setting and look at the low quality pictures instead. The slideshow will not let you view the original pictures.

[andrys]

... The slideshow as it was used the "large" size, which is 800x600...which for your horizontals would have been fine..but with verticals 800 vertical doesn't fit on a 768px vertical resolution screen. So the image is scaled an additional little bit to fit, hence the picture quality suffers....and with the script horizontal images are presented in the same way as the vertical. I believe the scaling is universal for both.

I just tried it. All my 800 width (I keep all of mine below 800x600)
are now 500+ average in width and are seriously degraded, with
lots of jaggies.

Also, on all verticles, a huge "Playing" layer is over the top part, so
faces are blocked.

Of all the places I've visited, PBase is the only one resizing
shots that are 800x600 DOWN to less than 640x480 even.

I like the 1-second option that's now there.

This is an inherent problem with online slideshows...maximizing quality of the image within the available space.

I wish they'd just compress the verticals larger than 600x.

I am currently on 800x600 due to failing video memory on the
desktop but I don't mind the image being a bit bigger.

They can put the 1-3-5-second options on the top, in smaller
lettering, so that people can get to them. What's the sense of
showing a slideshow of jagged looking pics.

MY VOTE is to let us disable the slideshow with degraded
images. Keep it for everyone but let us opt out. That will
save processing time too, I imagine.

If you look at my slideshow on Flickr you can see they employ Macromedia Flash 8 to display the slides...while the images are small...again a forced decison to accomodate people with 800x600 screen resolutions...the images are much clearer with no noticeable distorted compression the javascript scaling does.

That's very important.

[andrys]

Apologies for not knowing we can't edit our posts in this topic.
So I have a weird string of them.

...Also, a word on the scaling/resizing that goes on in the slideshow. The slideshow uses the largest possible image size on the server, except for your original upload. At this time we are not using the original upload b/c in most cases, this size is entirely too big. We do realize that some users optimize and resize their images before uploading, and that the qualitiy of these images is usually superior. Someday we hope to have an option to accomodate these optimized originals, but for now we are going to be using the large size.

I use only 800x600 and below and yet they're all about
500xwhatever right now. And the verticals all have this HUGE
"Playing" blocking out the top part of the pic even (!), which has blocked
the eyes of faces in mine. Surely you don't need to invade the
image space with "Playing" in huge fonts and taking part of the
image space in reduced photos?

Am currently on 800x600 display, due to a failing video memory block,
so it's using a smaller size than that. I guess you wanted space around it
and resized it from what you say below. That makes sense to me
but I wish the degradation (jaggies galore) weren't so bad.

True that many are still on 800x600. I see that all over work still.

As for accomodating browser window size, the slideshow script takes into account both the width and height of the window it is running in. The image is then resized accordingly to prevent the viewer from having to scroll around to see the full image (resize your window while the show is running to see it in action). This process can affect image quality because the resizing is handled by the browser, and most browsers do not have very efficient resizing methods. However, I think this is an acceptable compromise, and I have yet to see any drastic qualtiy concerns.

I first looked tonight, since I don't usually like slideshows but I
realize others do. My main concern is if you have to resize down
even 800x600's carefully resized for best resolution, I wish the
quality wasn't so degraded.

I came here to ask that we be able to opt out of the slideshow as
one of our options. Except for jaggies, it's a nice implementation.
So, I hoped we could opt out if we don't want the jaggies showing up.

But if people with 1024x768 and above don't have to get the
resizing then I'm not as unhappy as I was before I read your note.

Am using IE and will try Firefox, but most people are still
using IE.

[castledude]

Yea that does suck we can't edit anymore .. ouch...

For me the slide show only shows the Playing line for a moment then it fades out. The size is dynamically set based upon how big my window is in explorer. If if go to full screen it is bigger than if I look in IE with the top and bottom toolbars on...