Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Photo Galleries - Not lightbox style popups

Heres some galleries Ive recently looked at and will consider using in the future. They are not popups like lightbox.

http://malsup.com/jquery/cycle/
A gallery slideshow with multiple possible effects for transitions. (auto cycling through images)

http://devkick.com/lab/galleria/
A gallery maker with fade transitions and auto thumnail navigation. Good for a proper gallery but dosnt have choice of transitions as far as I can tell.

http://benjaminsterling.com/jquery-jqgalscroll-photo-gallery/
Photogallery with slide transition auto pagination for navigation. No back link on photo clicking photo only goes forwards.

http://smoothgallery.jondesign.net/
I used Smoothgallery today for a project. It was pretty good and is working in IE6 fine, took a bit longer than lightbox to set up. Spent a bit of time in forums getting around little issues. The great thing about it though is that if the user has javascript switched off the images just list themselves neatly down the page like a blog. Use the downloaded example demoslide.html, and customised it. Basically the problems were:
• showArrows: false, - this breaks the gallery. To get rid of the arrows do it in the css by making the arrow links css opacity levels be 0 everywhere.
• Deleting the 'open image' href will break the gallery unless you have added the option embedLinks: false, that has the added benefit of removing the lightbulb from the middle of the picture.
• Delecting the thumbnail image links breaks the gallery unless you specify the option showCarousel: false,
• You can easily remove the image title/ caption with the declaration showInfopane: false,