Image System Bugs and Suggestions

[zourtney]

When it says "1 of 749" or whatever, that it a little confusing. It kind of implies that the set has an intentional order, which it does not. And when does the order of that change? Having forward and back buttons, or event just a "random" button would suffice, in my opinion.

[Nick]

It changes every 10 minuets. I agree that its a little misleading but I liked that it showed you how many pictures were in the random pool. It needs some polishing. It would be easy for us to just hide the middle part. i might even be able to create a 'shuffle' button for it to return another random image.

Should we have another page for browsing the images one at a time? Should we reorder the random images more often?  I liked having a little widget for thumbing through the images in an idle manner. But I also wanted to have random images so people would see a new one over there every so often without having to do anything. Was combining the two a mistake? Or is it just a confusing pager? 

[zourtney]

I like knowing how many are in the pool as well. A "shuffle" button would make sense. For what ever reason, I expect that batch to get shuffled up every time I load the page. This does not seem to be the case. What do you mean by "another page for browsing images one at a time"?

[Nick]

A dedicated page that would be like the imagestream, but only display one image at a time. Like a slide show.

The problem with randomizing the images on each page load is that it might mess up other people who are trying to flip through the random images. I will have to test it I guess and see how it acts. 

[zourtney]

Yeah, and that makes sense. But when you reload the page, you current index isn't stored -- you get thrown back to the first image. I ran in to that once or twice. I say that if you're going to keep them in the same order, it should remember where you were. Otherwise, make it dumb and simple.

[Nick]

I know of no way to keep the location while using the ajax thing. Without the ajax I think it throws the current position into the URL but the whole page reloads when you switch to the next image, and that's annoying.

[Nick]

So cool. You can have a separate stack of random images for each user. So reshuffling will only effect the shuffler.

So lose the forward back buttons and add a randomize one? I still kinda like having the navigation option. But perhaps a more elegant one. 

[zourtney]

I sometimes like the navigation too, like when I am flipping through and want to go back to one I blew past...Perhaps this functionality would be better on a dedicated page? I don't know...

[Nick]

Its less convenient on a dedicated page. The more convenient something is the more likely it is to get used. At the moment I took the pager off and set it to randomize on each page load (because I don't know how to add a button that refreshes just the image block. Well I know how, I just don't know how to do it with drupal stuff)

[zourtney]

Well, should we pull the g2 random image block and switch randomland.net/gallery over to the newness? I think there are still a few images which have not been copied over to the newness, but nothing important. If we switch though, it'd be good to go through the whole site and forum and link stuff to new gallery images.

[Nick]

I think everyone has suggested that we do that. So yes, I do think its time.

[zourtney]

Is there any good way to do a site-wide search for images still linked up through G2? I'd like to move stuff over to the Drupal nodes because I like it's nativeness. Though I do think we need to put more work into making albums/sets/collections/whateveryouwanttocallthems.

I guess that goes for the forum too. I mean, we can do searches, but I'm not sure the search will pull up stuff based on keywords of image URLs...

[Nick]

All good questions......

[zourtney]

I removed the g2 block from the main site. The links still point to that gallery instead of our new one. How can we pretty up the landing page for the new gallery? I think that even the ability to have (and display) a gallery thumbnail would make that page 60% better. And a light sprinkling of CSS dust could make it highly tolerable! Is that possible?

[Nick]

I looked at the guts of the gallery thing and it is supposed to me showing thumbnails for the various galleries. But it is clearly not. I haven't found the problem. The best solution would be to get rid of the gallery module and just work with what we have made. Very little of it uses the module stuff any more. Just the list of galleries and the 'create new gallery' option. Or we could just make a new gallery display page. Though the gallery nodes are kinda strange. Oddly different from other nodes.