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Picasa Web Albums looking nice... 1 GB free

trisweb Administrator
in General support
I just saw Google updated their Picasa Web Albums yesterday, upgrading the free storage to 1 GB and adding new community features. It's looking very very slick.

Zenphoto needs a theme like that, don't you think? I think the best part is the responsiveness while browsing image-by-image, and all that is is using pre-loaded images at lower resolutions, Javascript for transitions (while preserving back/forward/link functionality with anchors) and using onMouseDown instead of onClick for immediate action on the previous/next buttons. Very slick.

Check out my gallery at http://picasaweb.google.com/trisweb if you've never used it.

Comments

  • Heggestad Member
    It reminds me of Flickr. I still think cropped one-size thumbnails look better, even if you don't see 100% of what you get. Response time for Picasa is OK but nothing special where I am. (Probably better in California).
  • trisweb Administrator
    It's got nothing to do with the response time over the internet, it's the interface -- images are pre-loaded, clicks are instant, etc. Just a few good ideas to steal ;-)
  • monster Member
    Idea with preloading images is great
    (like in my gallery :P http://www.pawelnawrocki.com
    slimbox JS does preload photos & and you can also slide photos using arrow keys) :)
    In Picasaweb preloading works fine if you spent more than 3-4 seconds on every photo,
    b/c they offer pure transfer and if you click on [next button] quickly
    you will see "deinterlaced" photo whick looks very bad for me :(
    I have 2Mb internet at home and 100Mb at University,
    and even there, photos load very slowly

    People who loves ZenPhoto (including me) won't move to PicasaWeb,
    b/c PW is made for masses, for people who dont care
    how their gallery's interface look like,
    who put to gallery every single photo they took last night on party...

    If it comes to gallery's interface I like that one
    http://www.carbonmade.com/
  • jleekun Member
    Wow. I'm liking carbonmade.com

    Hey tris, you're a photographer?
  • monster Member
    Isn't it cute? http://silscola.carbonmade.com/ I also like carbonmade,
    I think that it won't be difficult to make similiar theme for ZP :)

    Who wants to try? :D
  • trisweb Administrator
    Carbonmade does look nice... much more "designy" than picasa web. Someone should make a theme, I agree :-) Wouldn't be too hard.

    Also I made a theme with the loading style of picasa web, uses low-res versions until the hi-res is loaded. You may not like it, but I think it makes the interface much more responsive and that's worth it. Plus you could always just turn it off.

    I'm a photographer, yeah. I'm out of a camera at the moment since my old one was stolen, but I'll probably be getting one of these or maybe even this one in the near future...
  • thinkdreams Member
    Would you have to cache a low res version, running it through i.php first to get it to work properly that way?

    I guess it would be:

    Person accesses gallery image for first time -> image processed as low-res through i.php -> display low-res image while high-res is being processed through i.php -> display high-res.

    Would that create a double performance hit on the image processing?

    Hmm. Sounds intriguing though. Might be something to look at further. It would be a better presentation than the "fade" effect I have now which is very slow to load in some cases while it waits for the image to display.
  • trisweb Administrator
    Re: double performance hit -- not too bad actually; the images gen'd are thumbnail-size, about 100px. That's negligible space and remember, once processed, never again. It's a one-time gig. So completely worth it, in my opinion.

    I'll post an example when it looks better. I don't have the titles and descriptions quite working yet, nor the anchor linkage and back/forward support. It'll take some work, but I could also get it to be a "default option" for navigation so it automatically works for all themes.

    Speaking of fades as well, I'm thinking of fading between the lo-res and hi-res, it might work, and it would look sweet!
  • thinkdreams Member
    OK. That makes sense. I'd love to see your example when you get it done.

    Let me know if there's any grunt work I can do.
  • trisweb Administrator
    Here's a simple example...

    http://www.trisweb.com/tests/zenphoto-svn/Random/Desktops/ActionCat-1051338286.jpg.html

    It's so beautiful.... (tear)
  • thinkdreams Member
    It's very nice. Fast too.
  • SteveMoody Member
    Very nice.
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