Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

vargula · 2016-11-29 08:54:55

Hi

I'm having a general problem about my Lightroom-controlled image sort orders not being reflected in the web gallery.

Example order in Lightroom is here: NOTE the highlighted pictures:

Frame number 24 and 51 are in the right order in Lightroom:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/112 … htroom.png

But when published they are out of order:

http://ahsn.sintero.org/galleries/hopestreet/

I have selected sort order controlled by Lightroom

I have tried toggling all of the metadata push, gallery republish, refresh browser, restart, delete history + cache and restart tricks, no joy.

Its puzzling for my album viewers who lose the narrative in the slide captions, so I have to sort properly.

BW

Ed

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Some related user feedback (not criticism) after using Backlight for a few months - There may be a case of Backlight offering too many options on push/pull, and confusingly splitting controls over several input GUIs. For future versions tweaking certainly needs to be simplified as the majority use case would want it organised it out of a single UI (e.g. Lightroom or web but not both) as this would support a simple "tweak and publish to web" workflow.

I find that the split editing of captions and various cross-impacting clients/templates at TTG plug in level, at album level and page level to be unintuitive and thus intrusive to an efficient workflow. The templates and their naming are quite arcane and I don't dare to upgrade to a WordPress option for fear of losing formatting control from whats working.

There is terminology e.g. Trays, replace, on top of, below that is ambiguous as to what the setting affects. As it is at the moment (and since Backlight 1.0) there are MASSES of options which an ordinary user cannot see what the immediate effect is on the design - so its not WYSIWYG. To improve it for users, it would be good to either have a sandboxed template creator to WYSIWYG tweak a design and export a template OR [better] limit the options so its not so mind-boggling and do it all in Lightroom or a browser so you can get a grip of the interdependencies and see pre-publish how the set parameters will influence the output (so you can do proper tweaking).

Ben · 2016-11-29 08:59:24

The way to fix this is to edit the sort order in the Album settings. Double-click on the album and change the sort order there. You won't need to republish anything for that change to take effect.

We added this setting to our Album settings in order to work-around a bug in Lightroom. The "Sort: " field in your screenshot does not provide us with the order of images. The only time this field will work is on first publish. The one exception to this case is Custom Order.

I raised this as a bug with Adobe a few years ago. It went ignored.

Ben · 2016-11-29 09:14:08

On your other feedback. We're not in a position to move site+album management to one side or the other.
CE4 largely handled site management from within Lightroom, resulting in a pretty awful user experience. We also want to limit our dependency on Lightroom, as that places our business at the mercy of a third party that may drop the required support at any time.

Moving album management to the web would also create a less than ideal user experience. For the sake of having a single place to manage your site, you'd lose the agility in managing your albums and photos in one place. Let's say you have finished setting up and designing your site. From then on, you can maintain the album content from within Lightroom, creating albums and publishing photos as you like. If we were to move those album settings to the web side, publishing would become a two-step process: using Lightroom to send through photos, and then logging in to the web to manage where those photos went and how they were presented.
This will likely be the long term solution, but it needs to be managed in a way that makes the approach as seamless as possible.

On WYSIWIGs, have you tried using auto-refresh on your template designs? To do so, place the template designer on one side of your display, and the site itself on another. Click on the auto-refresh icon on the web page's footer, and you'll have the page refresh automatically within a couple of seconds any time you press enter or save on the template. I realise that isn't quite 'WYSIWIG', but it's a big step towards visualising the results of your choices made in the template designer.

rod barbee · 2016-11-29 09:57:12

it would be good to either have a sandboxed template creator to WYSIWYG tweak a design and export a template OR [better] limit the options so its not so mind-boggling and do it all in Lightroom or a browser so you can get a grip of the interdependencies and see pre-publish how the set parameters will influence the output (so you can do proper tweaking).

Backlight 1.1.0 introduced the ability to export and import templates.

The number of options to include or not include presents a fine line for Matt and Ben. I've been using TTG for quite a number of years and have been a forum moderator a long time. I've seen complaints about needing to use custom css or phplugins because this or that option is not included. I've seen complaints that there are way too many options and it's hard to know what they all do.
But yes, it takes some getting used to and my advice has always been to treat these web tools like a new camera. Use them, play with them, get to know them.

Matthew · 2016-11-29 12:05:52

Ben wrote:

On WYSIWIGs, have you tried using auto-refresh on your template designs? Have the template designer on one side of your display, and the site itself on another. Click on the auto-refresh icon on the web page's footer, and you'll have the page refresh automatically within a couple of seconds any time you press enter or save on the template. I realise that isn't quite 'WYSIWIG', but it's a big step towards visualising the results of your choices within the template designer.

If you haven't tried the autoRefresh feature, you can get a glimpse in our video demonstration from around the 9min mark. Here's a direct link to that point in the video:
https://youtu.be/jtzGfUiC6kU?t=9m

I'd also like to interject that this refreshing is leaps and bounds better than the refresh in Lightroom's Web module, which took so long a time to reflect changes as to be quite dire.

rod barbee · 2016-11-29 12:13:18

I'd also like to interject that this refreshing is leaps and bounds better than the refresh in Lightroom's Web module, which took so long a time to reflect changes as to be quite dire.

But it was a good opportunity to get another cup of coffee. Or clean the house. Or take the dog for a walk....

vargula · 2016-11-30 01:46:43

To Ben, Rod and Matt - thanks for superlative support here and yes I can only glimpse at the various constraints you are under and the fine lines etc. I look forward to trying the tweaks tonight and auto-refresh etc. I'm getting to know the new camera now, and understand it cant be all things to all users, maybe we should re-entitle WYSIWYG as WTAGAIG (Well, that's as good as it gets ;-) TTFN Ed

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 2016-11-29 08:54:55

Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

#2 2016-11-29 08:59:24

Re: Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

#3 2016-11-29 09:14:08

Re: Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

#4 2016-11-29 09:57:12

Re: Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

#5 2016-11-29 12:05:52

Re: Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

#6 2016-11-29 12:13:18

Re: Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

#7 2016-11-30 01:46:43

Re: Backlight 1.1.1 cannot solve inconsistent image order problem

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