During the last couple of days I’ve been tuning my site aiming at easing photo viewing especially when you are watching images from a series ie. galleries. One aim to also to present the images as good as possible on different devices.
The most visible change is a move away from images only inserted into different pages or posts in favour of presenting the images using a separate photo windows on top of the original page. This photo window – “lightbox” – includes the photo and buttons for browsing, closing the window and starting a slideshow. The window currently shows the image name, but my aim is to include a separate caption text if there is one attached to the image in my gallery software NextGEN Gallery. This type of presentation is today common with many web-based image services and as an example also in Facebook.
If you are looking at a gallery, I currently show first the whole gallery using thumbnail images, which you can click. Once clicked, the separate “lightbox” photo window opens up and you can browse the gallery or start an automatic slideshow.
You can see a simple example of this new way of view the photos by clicking the screenshot image on this post, and a better view by looking at my photo pages and galleries.
I hope this newest version is more usable than my previous ways of showing photos.
