New Photogallery

[Prospero]

Hello everyone,

This weekend I have drastically changed my photogallery. It was difficult to keep the old one up to date, and there were some things about the lay-out I did not like.

Here's a list of some of the changes:

I switched servers, the cabspace server was down way too often. I am using manicproject.co.uk; I hope it will do better.
I have decided that from now on I will use my own name (Dennis) rather than my DCRP account name.
I designed everything in such a way that you can view the gallery even if you use a screen resolution of 800x600 (in that case you will miss only a very small section of the photograph, but pressing F11 will solve that). To maximise the space I can use for the photographs I decided to get rid of the thumbnails of the easyviewer. I don't think many people used those anyway.
I added quite some new pictures and threw some of the weaker ones out.
I added a section where I can easily add links to galleries with more pictures and a section for panoramas (both these sections are still under construction).The new link to my gallery is: http://ddphoto.manicproject.co.uk

I hope you enjoy looking at my new gallery. Comments and criticism are more than welcome.

[toriaj]

I like! It loads quickly, and with a few minutes "down time," will scroll through several pictures in a row. It would be nice if it indicated how many pictures were left in the gallery (example, "Viewing 21 of 40.") Also would be good to have names, numbers, or some way to refer to a picture. Thumbnails would nice for picking out a picture to click on, and I wish that the white "next" arrow stayed in the same place for vertical/horizontal format pics. But you have some great shots in there, and I like knowing your real name, Dennis!

[cat]

Personally I think thumbnails are important! I'ld much rather pick and choose shots I think look interesting - I'm unlikely to scroll through every one. The stats from my site seem to indicate that's what most people do. The other thing I would say is your index is too close together, I'ld space them a bit to make it clear they are seperate categories. I love the simplicity and quick loading times though :D

[thai1on]

Being able to scroll through with the mouse wheel is pretty snazzy. And although clean sites are nice, having a bit more photo info would be nice as well. And maybe have the main image a bit more centered on the screen. You have some really great photos there! :)

[Prospero]

Thanks for the comments, Toriaj, Cat and Thai1on. I'll try to improve on the things you mentioned as soon as possible. My previous gallery did have the thumbnails and some information with every picture, but I found out that people with a screen resolution of 800x600 could see only a small part of the pictures without scrolling. The new design fixed that, but at the cost of some things.

I am using the simpleviewer and that is somewhat limiting. The thumbnails take up a lot of space, so if I add them again the images will get too small. The information of the pictures is for some reason linked to the thumbnails. Hence, no thumbnails means no information. Also, things like displaying the amount of pictures in the gallery is as far as I know impossible.

About the importance of thumbnails, I thought that because you can scroll so quickly through the gallery it would not be necessary (by the way, Thai1on, I didn't know you can actually scroll through the gallery using the mouse wheel, thanks for telling me). What I did not take into account is that my internet is so fast that it will keep up with any rate of scrolling, but if an internet connection is slow it would be very bothersome having to scroll through each and every picture. In the future I will definitly get them back on the site.

Anyway, I have some ideas about how I can make it work in such a way that it has thumbnails, some picture information, is viewable at 800x600, and make the categories clearer. First, though, I have to learn a lot more about HTML, Flash and all other things related to webdesign.

Thanks again for taking the time to comment on my gallery. I'll let you know when I have made some changes.