New feature for galleries

[nostromo]

Hi guys
I get back to this forum, after the successful root gallery proposal, with a new feature that may be many of you find it interesting: automatic processing to achieve larger thumbnails.

I am testing it in my favourites gallery:
http://www.pbase.com/nostromo/my_favourites

I do not now how many galleries are already incorporating this feature. Some months ago when I started thinking about this, the problem was unsolved in the pbase forums. If people find it interesting and I have time I can write a short tutorial about it.

To summarize:
1) I first tried to do it via CSS and changing the thumbnail object; it did not work.
2) After some time I learnt you can modify (with javascript) the attributes of the images in a web page. That's what I did. I wrote a javascript function to change the size of the images once they are loaded (that is necessary to know the size of each image). However it was not as nice as expected do to the high compression ratio of .jpg thumbnail images in pbase. The larger images looked pixelated.
3) Then I learnt you can modify also on the fly the URL of each image. Based on the URL of the small images, I figure out the medium size images, I load and dowsize them to the desired size.
4) The scale factor depends on the size of the screen, which is read from your browser.

I would like to further improve it, because now you have to wait until the whole page is loaded to "enlarge" the thumbnails ... but in the meantime I want you to have a look

Hope you like it
luis

[andrys]

Well done again, Luis !

It loaded a lot more quickly than I expected considering all that is
going on.

On a phone modem, it might be more noticeable of course.

I like it. The style of the borders is so wide that it looks a bit
crowded on my 1024x768 screen but that's easily fixable.

Yes, more delectable than the little thumbnails...

[dang]

I agree, it's nice having larger thumbs but I'm concerned about the upload time for dial up users. But it's nice to have the option, and something I could see using in special galleries. A tut would be great, as always. And maybe admin will decide to increase our thumbnail size too.
Thanks!

[flemmingbo]

Great work again Luis! A very cool feature, this could be very useful for some special galleries, like a collections of panoramas where the standard thumbnail is much too small.

Used with a style sheet with 1 or 2 columns only, this is a nice implementation and I have not seen this done before. What some people have done is use the Pblog template when they want bigger thumbnails. Pblogs use the medium size for thumbnails.
I see Cesar Fernandez has changed to pblog on some of his galleries: http://www.pbase.com/wildnature/panoramas

I'm not too keen on the pblog template though, don't like the images jumping from left to right alignment and back again. So your script might just be the answer!

regards, Flemming

[andrys]

I'm not too keen on the pblog template though, don't like the images jumping from left to right alignment and back again. So your script might just be the answer!...

There are pblog templates that don't have the left to right alignment
and back again. Some are all on the left, some are all in the center.

[flemmingbo]

I'm not too keen on the pblog template though, don't like the images jumping from left to right alignment and back again. So your script might just be the answer!...

There are pblog templates that don't have the left to right alignment
and back again. Some are all on the left, some are all in the center.

Great, thanks Andrys - I never noticed that, will check it out.

[arjunrc]

Hi guys
I get back to this forum, after the successful root gallery proposal, with a new feature that may be many of you find it interesting: automatic processing to achieve larger thumbnails.

I am testing it in my favourites gallery:
http://www.pbase.com/nostromo/my_favourites
luis

Luis, very nice. Frankly, I am surprised how soon the images are re-loading. Very nice work - keep innovating !

regds
arjun

[pinemikey]

I've added a pblog template to my list of available CSS templates which allows a medium thumbnail centered on a black background. Just because it is a Pblog template doesn't mean you can't use it in a regular gallery. I'm using it in my 35mm Verticals gallery. The CSS template is available here.