Hi,
I get lots of requests for gallery pages from clients and I always end up having to compromise the style and/or layout. I can never do what they actually want, which is basically a grid of thumbnails that pop up a larger image.
Ah! Simple you say, just use Showcase. Well, no. Showcase is rubbish, it has a major flaw if you want your gallery to look nice: You cannot have same-sized thumbnails if your images are different sizes. 100% of galleries I make use images where some are portrait, some landscape, some square, some 4x3 etc. etc. To make the thumbnails look nice I want them all the same size (scale & crop) not all messy. So you end up with a clean grid on the page.
Does anyone know of an action that will do this, even if I have to manually make cropped thumbs, separate from the target images?
I’ve tried slimbox/lightbox types but they take forever to put together and I end up losing money as I can’t charge clients for such a long time.
My necessity is for even sized thumbs, regardless of target image size.
If you look at my own gallery here you’ll see what I mean:
(that took flippin’ days to make by the way - never again!)
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Roger
I think it is a bit harsh to call Showcase rubbish. It may not do exactly what you want it to, but it is hardly rubbish.
My suggestion would be to Google jquery galleries, and prepare yourself for some indepth reading. Some you find will be paid for solutions and have automatic thumbnail and main image generation. Most are very elegant and you should find one to suit your needs.
No, I know it’s not really rubbish (I couldn’t write it!). I was just very frustrated with it when I wrote that. It is actually very clever, it just has that one flaw that makes it un-useable (for me anyhow). Everything else about Freeway is so good and works so well I think I’m just spoiled!
I’ll have a look at some jquery galleries and see if I can find something that will integrate into Freeway.
That’s OK. Freeway is a fantastic product, but it can’t always do exactly what we want with the more complex techniques we want to add to our sites.
The many jquery solutions will need adding as mark-up items, but if I can get them working, anyone can! Of course jquery could clash with other scripts such as scriptaculous, so make sure you pick solutions which will work with existing tricks.
Simpleviewer looks perfect! Thanks. Especially as they have a gallery creator app. Just what I needed.
Would it be easy to integrate a sv gallery into Freeway using mark-up items do you think?