Exhibeo impressions

Exhibeo
1

Hello,

I just noticed that there is a forum and thought I’ll delete my (bad) review on the AppStore as it might be more fruitful to write here and give the opportunity to reply.

I bought Exhibeo yesterday and I think that there are many things wrong with the app. It just doesn’t feel like a finished product:

  • There’s a strange omission of settings, e.g. the bloxx theme comes with ridiculous thick borders and you can’t change them (neither the thickness nor color). But you can change the border radius!? Why does the App offer a gazillion of settings for captions (which I don’t need) but you can’t change basic settings for thumbnails? (which, I believe should be a central focus of a gallery.) There is lots of inconsistency, because some themes offer customization of thumbnail borders.

  • you can’t easily create galleries that go with existing ones. exhibeo creates files in such a way that showing more than one gallery on the same page requires a lot of manual work (copying files, etc). For instance, the images go into a directory ‘image’, which is a terrible idea because where do you think another galleries’ pictures will go? How about adding a timestamp so galleries can happily coexist? Same goes for the css tags: it’s jut not created with multiple galleries in mind.

  • If you want to create several galleries with the same settings, you have to manually copy each setting. Why can’t I store the current settings and apply them to a new gallery? (Yes I understand that I can replace the images, but I still find that very inconvenient.)

  • changing parameters and updating the gallery is tedious: If you change a setting, you must export to a new gallery, you can’t just update the existing one.

  • some parameter changes are not all reflected in the preview. Some are, some are not. e.g. you only see the image border radius after you create the gallery.

  • the output page is inconvenient: It creates a preview page with code snippets which you’re supposed to put into your web page. Fine. But why don’t you create a web page that can be used straight away as well?

  • Exhibeo offers features such as cropping, rotating, resizing of individual pictures. I don’t need yet another app that does this, I have that already. I wish they had put this effort into missing features mentioned above, or features such as applying a watermark on all pictures or publish to a website. Why a gallery generator provides editing features is beyond me.

I’m sorry if this seems overly harsh and I hope my critique can be seen as constructive. I bought Exhibeo because the results looked really great. My hope was that it would safe me a lot of time creating galleries, but in its current state it creates new problems.

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2

Hi Alfu,

Thanks for your comments, and thankless for posting them here so that we can respond – it’s much appreciated.

On 8 Jul 2014, at 12:00, alfu email@hidden wrote:

  • There’s a strange omission of settings, e.g. the bloxx theme comes with ridiculous thick borders and you can’t change them (neither the thickness nor color). But you can change the border radius!? Why does the App offer a gazillion of settings for captions (which I don’t need) but you can’t change basic settings for thumbnails? (which, I believe should be a central focus of a gallery.) There is lots of inconsistency, because some themes offer customization of thumbnail borders.

There are a bunch of (on reflection, unnecessary) assumptions in the Bloxx theme that depend on things like borders and spacing being a fixed size so the thumbs can be restructured when the page is resized. We’re planning to address these as soon as we can.

  • you can’t easily create galleries that go with existing ones. exhibeo creates files in such a way that showing more than one gallery on the same page requires a lot of manual work (copying files, etc). For instance, the images go into a directory ‘image’, which is a terrible idea because where do you think another galleries’ pictures will go? How about adding a timestamp so galleries can happily coexist? Same goes for the css tags: it’s jut not created with multiple galleries in mind.

This is also something that we’re planning to address. It’s a painless exercise when using Freeway, but I agree, there’s a lot of room for improvement when hand coding.

  • If you want to create several galleries with the same settings, you have to manually copy each setting. Why can’t I store the current settings and apply them to a new gallery? (Yes I understand that I can replace the images, but I still find that very inconvenient.)

Yep, I agree. Some way of importing settings from an existing document would be really useful.

  • changing parameters and updating the gallery is tedious: If you change a setting, you must export to a new gallery, you can’t just update the existing one.

You can replace existing galleries, but this will always do a complete publish of everything, yes.

  • some parameter changes are not all reflected in the preview. Some are, some are not. e.g. you only see the image border radius after you create the gallery.

All the changes should be visible. Is this happening with a particular theme or all themes?

  • the output page is inconvenient: It creates a preview page with code snippets which you’re supposed to put into your web page. Fine. But why don’t you create a web page that can be used straight away as well?

Good idea.

  • Exhibeo offers features such as cropping, rotating, resizing of individual pictures. I don’t need yet another app that does this, I have that already. I wish they had put this effort into missing features mentioned above, or features such as applying a watermark on all pictures or publish to a website. Why a gallery generator provides editing features is beyond me.

I’ll log a suggestion for adding a watermark option. A lot of users find the image editing options useful! Going through a dozen (or hundreds) of images generating thumbnails in a graphics editing application is pretty tiresome in my experience.

I’m sorry if this seems overly harsh and I hope my critique can be seen as constructive. I bought Exhibeo because the results looked really great. My hope was that it would safe me a lot of time creating galleries, but in its current state it creates new problems.

Not at all - all feedback is useful and I really appreciate you taking the time. All cylinders are currently running on Freeway right now, but we have some existing new things lined up for Exhibeo in the future.

Cheers,
Joe

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3

Sorry, that was a terrible autocorrect there right in the first line. I of course meant to say thanks, not thankless!

Joe

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4

Thanks Joe, I really appreciate your detailed answer. I’m happy to see how you took my criticism which makes me convinced that Exhibeo will eventually grow into an app I will use and love.

Regarding parameter changes that are not reflected in the preview: I’m mistaken, I can’t reproduce it!

If I had one wish for immediate improvement, it would really be the possibility for multi gallery support, e.g. the images could go into a folder named ‘image_’ and the css/js is generated so that the gallery could be addressed in a exibid_-div. That way I could easily create multiple galleries on one page.

Regards and thanks again!

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