G'day all Thanks for all feedback on file size limits for our Pentax Users Gallery.
I thought about submitting all comments to PDML's Supreme Organising Committee (PDMLSOC) together with appropriate impact statements, triple bottom line analyses and recommendations but, after consulting Igor, I decided that the simplest thing would be for me to don my benevolent dictator's hat and hand down the following decision. First, thanks to John Francis for offering to host the gallery. I may have given the impression in my original post that storage space at Komkon is a problem. That isn't the case - I just mentioned the issue to keep people aware that Komkon is hosting the gallery for free and every monthly gallery adds to the storage requirements. Thanks again John, the offer is appreciated but we don't need to look at alternatives at this stage. Most gallery contributors seem happy with the status quo but there are two seemingly incompatible issues that some would like addressed: * Avoid the need for scrolling with images (mainly portrait format) that don't fit within a browser window. * Increase the file size limits. Incompatibility? I laugh..... Looking at scrolling first.. Paul Sorenson mentioned that JAlbum's Chameleon skin has an option to automatically scale images to fit within the user's available browser window. I hadn't noticed that option previously. I tried it out and it worked quite well on my desktop machine (running the browser at full screen resolution). In this case only one or two images needed to be resized by the JAlbum script to fit on the screen. However, when I tried it on a lower resolution monitor it became very unpleasant to watch. In this case all of the gallery images needed to be resized by JAlbum and the delay for each image to resize was sometimes 5 - 10 seconds after each had loaded. This could have been a good solution but I think it has limitations in practice. A less elegant way around this is to manually amend the html code so that any images that are deeper than 533 pixels vertically are displayed at that height. This isn't a big deal so I'll be doing this for the March Gallery (which should be up over the coming weekend). This should reduce the amount of scrolling needed when viewing the gallery but it won't eliminate it for some monitor displays (eg. laptops). Now, a few people don't mind scrolling and want to see the images at their original sizes (sigh...there's always a few in every organization....) To this end, a few suggestions were made, such as including a 'Click here to view full size' link or clicking on the displayed image to see it full size. Well, we're here to help! Your wish etc.... To keep these people happy, I've amended the Chameleon template so that clicking on a resized gallery image will show that image in a new window at its original size (actually, the option will exist for all images, even those that are already displayed at full size - in those cases, of course, clicking on the image won't show you anything bigger....). If you hover the mouse over a displayed image you should see a "Click to view original size" message. Note that this involves some Javascript - if you have it disabled you'll still see the full sized image but you'll need to use your browser's 'Back' button to return to the gallery after viewing it. OK - Moving on to size limits. I've decided to opt for Bruce Walker's suggestion that images should "fit within an 800x800 pixel box", at least in the short term. As Bruce noted "That will not unfairly penalize portrait or landscape images, but may encourage square crops as a side effect." This will probably make the majority of submissions 800 x 533 pixels which, I think, is large enough for an online gallery (now you know where the "533' figure above came from....). If contributors are happy with the "click here to view original size" procedure, we could possibly go for larger sized submissions down the track. As for byte size - that will be 300k. OK - I'll now take off my dictator's hat. The new size limits will apply from the April gallery. Please forward all complaints to the PDMLSOC.... Cheers Brian ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://lyons-ryan.org/southernlight/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and love email again -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
