Feedback Requested

[olli]

I've been tweaking a few things on my smugmug site over the last week. The most noticeable change should be with the front page slide show. Apart from a different set of images, which I will be rotating regularly, the two key changes should be that the slide show loads more quickly and that the images stretch to fit the size of the viewer's monitor.

I'd appreciate it if any of you who have previously looked at my smugmug site could take a look and let me know if the slideshow is faster and if it is stretching. Thanks.

You will find my smugmug site here.

 

[Herman]

Hi Olli, i just took a look at your site. (for the first time)
It looks great, well done. I especially like the supermarket shot.
As I see a lot of strange words I wonder where do you live (which part of the world)?

 

[Ray Sachs]

Olli - I don't recall how it did (or didn't) work before, but it works very well now. The slideshow comes up very quickly on the home page and the images shrink or expand to fit the window. Even if I expand or shrink the window on the fly, while the slide show is playing, it adjusts very quickly to fill the space I give it. I also really like the look and the navigation of your site. I'm thinking of adding either Smugmug or Zenfolio to my existing Flickr stream and the one concern I have about Smugmug is that in the galleries, it doesn't seem possible to view the images any larger than about a medium size - nothing close to a full screen look. I've noticed this on other people's Smugmug accounts also and I'm wondering if its just a constraint of their service or if its something you can set? That's the primary issue that has me leaning toward Zenfolio at the moment. But I love the way yours looks and is laid out until I get to viewing individual photos...

I like Flickr in many ways, but I don't like that anyone can view my whole stream rather than just organizing by galleries or sets. I mean, I do have a number of sets, but anyone can navigate back to my entire flickr stream very easily from ANY flickr shot I link to. I throw a lot of stuff up there that I really don't want as part of a general gallery - for equipment for sale, an example of how NOT to do something, sometimes I'll even do a re-processing of someone else's work from a forum to show them another possible approach (with permission, of course) and I put THAT up there so I can link to it. I'd really like a site just to show my best stuff in a more organized fashion and Flickr isn't cutting it in that regard. So, in your experience, is there a way to show photos larger from your gallery if you choose? Even if I launch a slideshow, it goes into full-screen mode and blacks out my entire monitor, but the images still show pretty small right in the middle of the monitor???

-Ray

 

[PeterB666]

I like the site Olli - works well, nice and simple. I particularly liked your gallery page and the by camera grouping.

 

[olli]

Thanks all.

Herman, I'm in Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia, though I'm originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland.

Ray, the gallery view in smugmug is very flexible. If you click on the button marked 'style' in the top right you have options for how the gallery will display. I can choose to only allow it to display in one style or allow viewers to choose for themselves. In the default style, clicking on the larger image to the right of the thumbnails opens that image in a lightbox. That gives you the option to choose the image size though I can set an upper limit (which I have). However, it is possible to allow for larger image sizes to be chosen including full size.

If you go to this gallery and click on the image on the right to open the lightbox, you'll see the full range of size options available above the image. Click on these to get an idea of the sizes that display with each option. I'll leave this one set this way for a day or two in case anyone else wants to have a look.

The other thing I like about smugmug is that it is very customizable - there are lots of options for getting the site to look an run the way you want it to. I'm sure zenfolio has many of the same options available but I've been very happy with smugmug so far.

 

[AzPete]

I totally agree with the above people. Very well put together and I love the blog section. I myself have a smugmug site that is rather normal looking and Id love to sort of copy your look. And to incorporate my personal writing blog, with my photos all in one place. btw: the slide showw runs very well.

Well done grasshopper.

Pete

 

[Ray Sachs]

Ray, the gallery view in smugmug is very flexible. If you click on the button marked 'style' in the top right you have options for how the gallery will display. I can choose to only allow it to display in one style or allow viewers to choose for themselves. In the default style, clicking on the larger image to the right of the thumbnails opens that image in a lightbox. That gives you the option to choose the image size though I can set an upper limit (which I have). However, it is possible to allow for larger image sizes to be chosen including full size.

If you go to this gallery and click on the image on the right to open the lightbox, you'll see the full range of size options available above the image. Click on these to get an idea of the sizes that display with each option. I'll leave this one set this way for a day or two in case anyone else wants to have a look.

OK, yeah that more than takes care of that concern. Very nice. Now I just have to compare a bit more and decide if Smugmug is worth the additional cost relative to Zenfolio. Thanks much for your help...

-Ray

 

[olli]

Thanks Master Po.

The place to start for developing your own look is the easy customizer under the tools tab. My banner and navbar and all the fonts, sizes and colours are set from here.

Then you can go to the customization faq's for more options. After that the dgrin forum is full of all manner of useful and not so useful tweaks. What I particularly like about it is that even if you don't know much about coding it's often a matter of just cutting and pasting from the tutorials that smart people post. Better yet, when you do screw it up, some kind person on the forum will explain exactly what you did wrong and how to fix it.

The blog is just a bog standard blogger effort. The nice thing about blogger is that you can tweak the look as much as you like since you have full access to all the code. There are also a few third party tweaks available as well (for example, to hide the blogger bar). This mean it is possible to replicate the look of your smugmug site on your blog and the just link them through a navbar. If you really want to go integrated you can get your own domain name (which I have just done) and then get a subdomain for your blog (or blogs).

 

[john1027]

Looks good to me olli. I have used SmugMug for a couple years and your post reminds me that I still need to do some needed reorganization to my galleries. Doing so is one of my goals for the year (so far not making much progress).

I usually tell people that the best way to see the images is via the slide show option where all the other clutter is removed from the screen. My goal is to get my stuff to look like this site...

Phil Douglis Travel Photography Archive | SmugMug

Phil Douglis had assisted with some photo image quest posts over at mu-4/3s last year, and I like the way he has things laid out.

 

[olli]

Thanks john. That's an amazing collection of images he has and places he has visited.

Once I'm done tweaking the look I also need to have a think about organisation of the galleries. Amazing how much time it eats up.

My big project for this year, which Phil Douglis' site reminded me of is to get a lot of my pictures published via blurb and finally get them on the shelves which is as close to the walls as most of them will ever get.

 

[BBW]

olli, your home page looks really good to me and the speed at which the photos change seems very good... Long enough but not too long for a quick look through. It appears that if one wants to look at an individual photo for a longer period of time one needs to go into the galleries.

Very nicely done.

 

[olli]

Thanks. This is a new slideshow I'm using. I haven't quite got it fully set up yet but I should be able to set it to go to the relevant gallery on a left click.