BU's image viewer

[daloonie]

Please either enhance it alot or remove it. It really sends any browser to its knees. Especially the larger galleries like the ut3 one.

It's extremely annoying not just being able to tab away from a loading image because that'll take a million years and you'll end up with a blank tab.
And it loads so effing slow. So I usually give up before watching an image. It's not like my connection is slow as it supposedly should be 10/1.

 

[Slainchild]

Direct links to images plz.

thx

 

[haarg]

After this month when things calm down at work a bit, I have several projects for BU to work on. Replacing the image viewer is near the top of that list.

 

[dub]

when you click on the center of an image in the image viewer (which works fine here (machine with only 2 GB of RAM)) it opens the image directly. Guess that's no use though, if you can't see the images in the first place.

You see, I quite like the image viewer, because before you had to click back and forwards for different images where as now you can just browse the relevant images and choose which ones you want to see in more detail.
Also before the image viewer days, it seemed to me as though the images were saved a little bit anywhere on the site, meaning that when you went back to old articles pictures were sometimes missing. It's always run smooth for me

 

[haarg]

There are some good things about the new viewer, but many people have had issues with it. What I have in mind should include the best parts of the new viewer, but will simplify things significantly.

 

[Zur]

This image viewer has appeared recently on many sites. It looks fancy but one big letdown is that people who have connection problems have to reload a page in order to access a site again.

 

[T2A`]

I hate that if you look at 20 images you have to hit back 20 effing times to get back to front page. It's terrible for usability and makes you look at each image twice for no reason.

A BU-wide problem is that whenever you go back to the front page it doesn't remember your scrolling place and instead puts you back at the top every time. Annoying! This is basic interbutts functionality!

 

[Slainchild]

A thumbnail gallery below the forward/next viewer would be ok.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

I hate that if you look at 20 images you have to hit back 20 effing times to get back to front page. It's terrible for usability and makes you look at each image twice for no reason.

It's terrible usability that you can browse through the iamges you've viewed and bookmark specific images in a gallery? That's basic nterbutts functionality!

A BU-wide problem is that whenever you go back to the front page it doesn't remember your scrolling place and instead puts you back at the top every time. Annoying! This is basic interbutts functionality!

That's because the page is dynamic PHP and can't be cached by your browser. We'll probably look into some way to fix that at some point.

 

[T2A`]

It's terrible usability that you can browse through the iamges you've viewed and bookmark specific images in a gallery? That's basic nterbutts functionality!

Pfft. Everyone knows you bookmark and/or send people the full path to images.

That's because the page is dynamic PHP and can't be cached by your browser. We'll probably look into some way to fix that at some point.

Hmm. If it's merely a caching issue then even WordPress has got the caching thing handled. I recall reading an article on a basic way to do it; didn't seem too difficult.

IMO, you guys should use Lightbox so you don't even have to navigate away from the front page. That solves both problems.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

The problem is that lightboxes are not very conducive to galleries. It would only really function for individual images.

Additionally, the galleries themselves are bound to have more than few images that we can just display on a single page effectively. It's better to have it in a built gallery like we have (though it has it's share of problems).

There is really nothing specifically wrong with the way it's functioning right now. If it's slowing your browser to a crawl, there is something wrong with your system in terms of extensions installed in firefox, or something else if it's another browser. I use/used it in FF2, FF3, Opera 9, Safari 2, Safari 3, Konqueror, and IE6 and 7 and all of them work just fine.

That said, something simpler would be better.

 

[T2A`]

I haven't messed around with Lightbox too much, but you can "galleryize" it a bit and navigate through a list of images without much of a problem.

I found a WordPress plugin that launches it automatically for all images linked to in a given post. You insert the thumbnails and it handles the rest. Fairly handy, IMO.

I recall BU's current gallery thing not even navigating the images well. I remember several instances of me hitting the next button and getting a completely different image than I was expecting.

 

[Sir_Brizz]

The database joining on a few of the categories got messed up when we first started, so some of the images are mixed up. I haven't had time to go through them and fix them.

Still, I DO agree that the image viewer could be better, but what we have works for right now.

 

[daloonie]

This is an idea for a gallery, but I doubt it would go well with large galleries.
The basic idea of the image viewer is good, though it should instead of having fancy scrollers and advanced javascript, or whatever it is, use a simple image and a row of thumbnails. Possibly a very basic slider for the thumbnails. I believe most can live without the forward, back links on the images.

 

[TossMonkey]

God I am so glad this is getting looked at. I have been meaning to create a thread like this for ages but put the lag down to browsing the site on my laptop. I rarely look at the front page these days but if I do I really avoid clicking the images since it takes so long to view one.

I think Kotaku is the only site with a similar image system but it seems to work faster, maybe you should look into doing it the same fashion as them?

 

[Sir_Brizz]

Well the one we are currently using has a lot of bloat, for sure. It's also quite buggy. A better solution is what we are shooting for that fits our needs more precisely instead of just shotgunning it.

daloonie: Your image viewer is pretty buggy and wouldn't work well for a large gallery, but point well taken.

 

[Nemephosis]

What exactly was wrong with the way it used to be done, where clicking the image actually brought it up instead of a black screen that doesn't do anything else?

This is another user chiming in with "get rid of it, it sucks". Please?

 

[Sir_Brizz]

The old way was fine for individual images, except that there was no way to browse images with it. We wanted to introduce image galleries so people could look through images in different categories at their own discretion, and this was just the implementation we ended up with.

 

[haarg]

It would probably work fine if you didn't have 50000 Firefox extensions installed.

We wanted to make some improvements to the image viewer. Obviously it isn't perfect at this point. But we've already said several times it is going to be worked on in the near future.

 

[TossMonkey]

It would probably work fine if you didn't have 50000 Firefox extensions installed.

I don't get what you're saying, I use opera.

Anyway, it seems to be almost flash based or something.. wouldn't a CSS based system be more efficient?