Community @ The Turning Gate

skipper

Member

Registered: 2013-04-26

Posts: 121

My first impressions of Gallery CE4

I used the very simple and nice "Elegance" theme from photographers toolbox for my CE3 Pages homepage, but I was not really happy with the scaling for mobile devices.

That's why I bought Gallery CE4 now, since I redid my page in pages CE4 and because the CE4 is being marketed as made for the mobile device scaling.
But I must say, that for me it is a sobering experience so far. I spend all day today trying out all sort of combinations in Gallery and none does really fit my needs or expectation. I like things to be extremly simple and clean.

The "Touch" presentation for large images to me really seems like the only option that does work half way intuitive on touch mobile devices. But here are the points, that I do not quite understand:

1. If it is designed as a slideshow, why can't it auto start? And when it runs as a slide show, there should be an option to hide the arrows for a clean look.

2. If I click on an image while the show is running, I would expect it to advance to the next image or halt the show. Not blend in the slideshow user interface, which by the way has fuzzy looking icons on my 27 iMac and on my iPhone as well.

3. Transition: Why can't I have the choice of a simple and nice Fade like in the Pages slide show? I think the way the images are yanked in looks brutal to my eye and it sort of shakes me up every time the next image moves in. It looks like a Blitzkrieg, sorry, my gut feeling. I would not want this kind of hectic presentation for potential clients.
If I can edit the speed it rolls in and make that way slower in a php file, I would gladly do that. A simple Fade would be more desirable.

4. Why do I need the arrows at all on an iPhone? We are used to move to the next photo by sliding our finger over it on iPad and iPhone. There is no need for arrows really. And they distruct my images, since they are hovering over every image, does not look clean and not very pro to me.
On the iPad mini the arrows are hovering over the very edges of the vertical images and are smack on the horizontals. It is just very distracting to the eye, especially when viewing images with clean backdrops.

5. Thumbnail grid on Mac looks great, on my phone it fills in squares and cuts off the images. I want an option to see the whole image, just like it is displayed on the Mac. Some of the thumbnails look really blurry, others look ok, why is that so?

Maybe I have not seen all the options and choices to customize the gallery and some things can already be done as is? I really think, that one should have the chioce to hide the arrows on mobile devices. They are just obstructing a clean view of the images and look bloody big on the iPhone and iPad mini.

No hard feelings, this is meant as constructive criticism!

If someone has ideas how to work around some of these issues, please let me know, thanx.

Cheers

Peter