Hi,
I look after www.hexhamphotographic.org, I have made use of the includlet for to present the photo’s within albums into pages structured within the site.
The grid you get when placing the includlet is fine in most cases - alignment options such as catered / top / bottom of the image would be nice and if only I had an option for 5 images across… If the “lightbox” view had an obvious link to view full screen that would be nice too as I don’t think most users would think of right clicking and opening in a new tab to do that.
What I would find useful in some cases is an option to place an “image viewer” rather than a grid on a page so it presents a single image with a caption and a next / previous option. This should allow me to run a simple competition jugged by members using a simple google survey form embedded into a page. (It’s nothing fancy just a list of image names allowing members to vote for a 1st 2nd and 3rd placed image.)
Where we have required meta data in the past is just for competition submissions we have worked around with a simple naming convention e.g. B_M_The reaper_87.jpeg – this is a beginner mono, the image title is the reaper and it is from member number 87.
We are looking in future to use survey forms or maybe the files application so members submit images. Files have the advantage of bulk download, but other members would be able to see submissions – surveys have an anonymity advantage but I think attached images would need to be downloaded on a one-at-a-time basis unless I have missed something.
Regards,
Stephen Smith.
The image viewer you talk about sounds a bit like the Slider includelet - this already allows you to show image and text together and move through a set of pictures. Maybe all this needs is the ability to specify a photo album (or a folder in the assets library?) as the source for the images, rather than having to manually add each one?
Is there anything else that the Slider doesn't do that you think would make it more useful? I imagine the automatic sliding might be annoying if you're trying to appreciate a photo and it keeps changing! So adding a config option to set the delay time perhaps?
You could also try the Polls app/includelet for voting for favourite picture - you can restrict polls to only logged in users if you want to prevent cheating!
From the surveys app you can download a CSV of all responses which will contain links to each attached file - you still need to get each one individually of course, but at least you have the reference all in once place. (I only recently added the attachment links in the CSV so if you already tried this then try it again! :-))
Cheers
Joe - Voice Admin
Hi Joe,
Yes, the slider includelet would work, but yes images changing automatically would be a touch annoying. If a fully manual option is not possible a long delay would sort that I guess. In terms of useability, is it possible to add a next/previous button to the interface? Only on a touchscreen device, you can't swipe through images you have to use the dots which is actually harder on a larger touch screen than a mobile...
I will have a look at the polls app, it may be useful but we are also trying to encourage members to supply feedback (without much success) so it may be more of a survey than a poll.
I had not noticed the change to the survey image csv files but that will be most useful for competition use so thanks!
Stephen
Love your site Stephen - really clean and tidy! Your news items are really well laid out, and you can filter them ð® Is that to do with the theme you are using or your superior technical ability? I'd love to know how you added the filter and got your news items to display as a 3 column grid with nice headings and summary text :)
Hi Kev,
Thanks, the site is still a bit of a work in progress, although it is something you never really finish.
The news layout is nothing super technical, all the news and results are just done with the "filtered item list" includelet using a grid layout. I have used keywords on the pages/news item and the summary I think is just the subtitle.
The "Filtered item list keywords" does the filtering, it was just placed on the page above the filtered item list.
Regards,
Stephen.
Thanks Stephen - I wondered if the filtered list might be the case so I've played with that in the past and again today - I can't seem to get it working though, and even if I managed to get some items appearing (pages rather than news items), they don't look even half as nice as yours. I think I'm probably going off topic with this thread so I've opened a more relevant one in the general support forum here: Voice Online Communities | General Support: Help building a news(?) page (e-voice.org.uk)
Much appreciated, and thanks for taking the time :)