Gallery Lightbox - Viewing larger images

[Dylan Riggs]

So, the gallery is one of my favorite parts of the IPS Community suite, but I feel that it's just not executed very well, at least on the front end, so I figured I'd come here and offer a quick suggestion on the light box for a more general and easier browsing experience that I feel should come standard out of the box for IPS 4.0 (basically, just replace the lightbox you're currently using)

So, when I upload an image and want to take a look at it, you'll see this:http://prntscr.com/5hbdh2 -- From this screen, you can kind of see a little detail, or what the perspective of the image is, it's a web design, but can you really take a good look at the web design? No, you can't... so then you would want to view a larger version of this, and to do this, you must then click the "View in Light box" button, correct?

When clicking that, you're presented with: http://prntscr.com/5hbecq -- Now did anything change from the first image to the 2nd image linked here? Did the browsing experience change at all minus the overlay affect of the lightbox behind the image? Are you able to inspect the image more thoroughly, are you able to see more details about the image? What if this was a photography site I was running? The lightbox at its current state isn't adding much, if any helpful resources for the end user. For images of this length, we would need to inspect the full size image, correct?

So let's move to the "View full size" and see what's changed: http://prntscr.com/5hbf7n -- Look what we have here, nothing at all has been changed from link one to link 3, it's the exact same image, so what's the point? Is this a compression or limitation by the gallery settings or by design? If so, it shouldn't be as I feel you're crippling the viewing experience - I understand if you this can be enabled/disabled on the fly, but even then... the lightbox is still not helping the browsing experience.

My suggestion is to load the image into the lightbox but allow the user to interact with the image in its full detail by hovering over the areas of the image, or simply load it in its full width/height fashion, currently the lightbox just isn't doing anything and this was upon checking numerous other images. Simply put, there is no correlation between uploading the image, selecting the lightbox or selecting "view full size"

The image I tested with, is NOT full size - The width of the real full image is 2600px in width.

 

Just my 0.02c for what it's worth. If this is for testing purposes or to constrain load on the server, well.... it's not offering potential clients to see the software in its glory

 

 

[Dylan Riggs]

Any comment on this at all?
 

[3DKiwi]

I agree. The Gallery leaves a lot to be desired and is quite unintuitive to use.

[Joel R]

I agree. The Gallery leaves a lot to be desired and is quite unintuitive to use.

​For what it's worth, I think the new IP.Gallery in IPS 4 is much better.  I'm a massive user of galleries, I constantly research up-and-coming gallery systems, and I do think IPS has made some impressive changes:

• Justified image grid (aka "Flickr style") for thumbnails is gorgeous.
• Album view is nicely done, especially if you need to write a lot of information
• Navigating between photos is much easier now, including navigation by keyboard arrows
•  Responsive design, which is something galleries haven't really embraced.  Photo portfolios usually like big splashy full-size screens, but responsive design broadens the appeal to casual and mobile users

[Dylan Riggs]

​For what it's worth, I think the new IP.Gallery in IPS 4 is much better.  I'm a massive user of galleries, I constantly research up-and-coming gallery systems, and I do think IPS has made some impressive changes:

• Justified image grid (aka "Flickr style") for thumbnails is gorgeous.
• Album view is nicely done, especially if you need to write a lot of information
• Navigating between photos is much easier now, including navigation by keyboard arrows
•  Responsive design, which is something galleries haven't really embraced.  Photo portfolios usually like big splashy full-size screens, but responsive design broadens the appeal to casual and mobile users

​It is more usable than 3.4 for sure - But the point of the thread is how utterly useless the lightbox --> full size image is, when nothing at all gets changed. The lightbox feature should surely be more intuitive than what it currently is.