I had this idea on the back of my mind for a while now; the idea of making a photo gallery that’s both efficient and good-looking, one that supports a large number of images sorted in categories, easy to navigate either randomly or in sequence.
Finally, I have a working version and I’d really like some feedback. The Gallery also has a publishing tool that generates the thumbnails & descriptions and customizes the colors of the Gallery but that is still under development (C#) so for now I’m concentrating on polishing the Flash part as much as possible.
I’d be very glad if you could spend five minutes browsing through the sample pics from my collection and let me know:
- What you like about the gallery;
- What you dislike/hate about it;
- What new features you’d like to see;
- What bugs you’ve noticed or areas where it may be improved.
Click to see the gallery in action
I liked everything except:
The tweened rescaling of the full size window. (too heavy for my old 1ghz cpu)
And the navigation in the full size image should be disabled when you’re at the start or end of the category (some sort of indicator would also be nice..like “image 1 of 2″)
Yeah and another thing I would do is tint the background 70% black so the image stands out above the background. Good job though…you should tie it into the Fireworks Album Creator 1.0
http://www.fireworksguru.com/fwalbumcreator
Looks good, nice work.
Only thing that got me is that it looks like a lot of the images are being scaled down, which creates artifacting (makes the images looks blocky).
For those slow pesky machines, maybe turn quality to low when scaling, and then back to high quality when the image is being displayed. Then back to low when an animation is being done.
Try this: http://www.kaourantin.net
Suggestions:
1. I agree with the scaling, it’s too slow. Speed it up a bit (i’m impatient)
When browsing through the photos (like I clicked on a thumbnail, now viewing full image:
1. I don’t like waiting for the viewer to resize when the image shape changes
2. Don’t make the previous image disappear until the next one is ready, looking at a flat grey square doesn’t look as nice. Maybe do an alpha fade from one image to the next (but short, 1 second maybe)
3. Preload the next image while I am viewing an image, so when I hit ‘next’ the new one pops up instantly without me waiting.
Overall, try to keep the interface simple, with few effects (sliding, scaling, etc are generally annoying unless they are very fast and not too noticable)
Good work! I look forward to a release.