JungleDragon image gallery preview »
FERDY CHRISTANT - MAR 10, 2010 (08:21:29 PM)
In the spare moments I have time to work on JungleDragon, I am currently focusing on getting image galleries right. An image gallery is essentially a list of images. It could be a list uploaded by a particular user, a list of favorite images, a list in search results, a list based on a particular tag, etc.
Needless to say, this is essential functionality for an image community platform, so I'm putting in a lot of time and effort to get it right. That should keep me busy for the coming weeks, but I can share a small preview already (click to enlarge):
An overview of features I'm planning for:
- Single column full width viewing, different from most Jungledragon screens that have a two column layout. Full width in this case means full layout width, not the width of your screen.
- Gallery sorting (most popular, most recent, most comments)
- Four display modes: small, medium, large and slideshow :
- Small: grid of small thumbs.
- Medium: grid of medium thumbs.
- Large: Large images along with details such as title and description, as seen on the screenshot.
- Slideshow: One very large image followed by a filmstrip of thumbs
- The small and medium display modes have rich tooltips that show image details upon hovering them
- Users can save their preferred display mode at any time
- Convenient color coding feedback that highlight images with comments, votes or tags
- The amount of images you see per screen depends on your reputation, the better it is, the more rows of images you see, introducing yet another incentive to do well in JungleDragon
- Ajax-style display mode switching, sort switching and pagination. Still in doubt how far to go here.
- Being able to edit or delete the image from these overviews if this concerns your own image or if you are an administrator. Even better would be an inline-edit capability.
- In a later release of JungleDragon I may also include a fifth display mode: Kiosk.The idea behind kiosk is that images are shown in their largest possible size and all non-essential UI elements are stripped.
Once I get all of this right, I can reuse it across many parts of JungleDragon.
How about some early feedback?
Comments: 4
Reviews: 1
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Highest rating: 4
Lowest rating: 4
COMMENT: TOM
MAR 16, 2010 - 15:20:28
Here are some things that came to my mind while reading.
1. A gallery mode of images by user and/or a specificy "My images" gallery.
2. Maybe you need to incorporate something like image licenses (like Flickr does) as an attribute of the images (see http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses).
If professional or semi-professional wildlife photographers discover your site they might want to share some of their work but might not want it to become public domain (especially high-res images).
3. It does not seem to me that more rows of images per screen depending on your reputation is a motivational incentive. It sounds more like "crippleware" if it's not available for casual users.
4. Will the slideshow mode have an actual timer that changes the image?
There you go, my 2 cents to help open the feedback for you.
Greetz, Tom. «
COMMENT: FERDY
MAR 16, 2010 - 03:36:18 PM
1. Will be delivered. In fact, the screenshot shows the images uploaded by a certain user and of course you can also do this for your own account.
2. Good point. I need to dive into the license models for photographs to make sure users are not encouraged to break any rules. Currently, an image uploader can choose the image license during upload, but that's about it.
3. Just see it as an extra. I will make sure that for default users they can see plenty of rows. It's just that high profile users see a bit more. This model is also applied at sites like deviantart, in fact, there you have to pay to see more.
4. Currently not, but that is the plan. «
COMMENT: TOM
MAR 16, 2010 - 18:19:53
About the licenses; I saw that creative commons has a set of 4 icons to quickly indicate what is allowed and what not. Those should fit in nicely with your UI I guess.
Greetz, Tom. «
COMMENT: FERDY
MAR 16, 2010 - 19:40:57
Yes, I'm familiar with those icons and that should be easy to implement. The only problem is that most photographers do not distrubute their work under Creative Commons, a lot of them apply a more strict "All rights reserved" license, which is the default and country specific.
I still have to learn what this means for my responsibilities as a "distributor" «