[Pro] Carousel with overlying DIV

Freeway
1

I think. I’ve tried several methods to implement the layout I’d like to have, with no success. Perhaps some kind soul will tell me where to find the wheel I suspect I’m reinventing.

Please first look at http://luckypro.biz/client/walter/v4/01_portfolio/port-02_figur.html . For those of you with Firefox, you’ll see a scrolling carousel whose images open a modal window.

My client wants to see big images. It’s nice photography and I agree. We currently have many, too many, pages at say, http://bartwalter.com/01_port/01_images/port_01-4_african/ix_03_01_4_1.html. Five thumbnail pages!

I want to collapse these existing thumbnail pages into one page per category. Each category page should have one carousel. Each carousel image should, ideally, open and populate an initially hidden DIV with the full size of the thumbnail image, hiding the carousel DIV. I have implemented something along these lines at http://alesiaartglass.com/01_residential/ix_residential.html. But of course there, the thumbnails are just static images.

The new site will have carousels that might have as many as, eventually, 35 images. (The Closed Works carousel will have images added to it constantly. Might total 50 images soon.) I very much like the idea of populating the carousel with a UL list, or javascript variables, or even an XML file. It would be so much easier than the current rigamarole of making the static thumbnail pages. Especially since there are a limited number of photos to display. They repeat from category to category.

(This is probably an excellent candidate for a PHP site, but, again, getting the template that would work cross-browser, and that I could customise, is beyond me.)

I contacted SlideShowPro, and they told me their Flash shows couldn’t do anything like this. (Large images in scroller, replace scroller with full size, revert to scroller, etc.) I’d have to work in Flash --which I don’t own-- and customize the show using their API. Good lord. Way beyond me.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to do this? I’m not a javascript wizard, but I’m not unfamiliar with it. Any advice would be appreciated.

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2

I’m going to reply to my own post and change the question entirely. I tried using the excellent Carousel Action some while back for this project, and reluctantly abandoned it because I couldn’t get it to make a multi-image Carousel. But I think, maybe, I need to switch to a different design.

OK, one big honking Carousel. full-size images, sliding over each other one at a time. Standard Walter Carousel, just huge.

Now, I have a collection of about 100 images. They are categorized into: New, Figurative, African, American, Avian, Monumental, etc. The categories overlap: an image could be New, African and Monumental. Now, I think the one-image-carousel could fly. But, making the whole site would mean doing essentially what I’m doing now: drawing a jillion picture boxes, many of which duplicate each other, and putting them on Freeway pages, all by hand. A page with 35 huge FW graphics is going to be a mes to administer, although the new (to me) Page Panel helps immensely.

I should say this site I’m reworking is ongoing. Two or three times a year the client has me remove and add New Items, which also get added to their respective categories. Items are removed from categories and placed in the Closed section.

I’m wondering a few things…

  1. Could the carousel items be written in as HTML markup? Cutting and pasting into a simple text list (as if this were an XML driven function) would be easier than manipulating all those huge space occupying graphics.

  2. Along completely different lines, is there a way to create a text list (could be a table of graphic text) on the page that would be able to jump the Carousel to a given item? Kind of like tiny tabs?

  3. Is it possible to caption Carousel items? Group them with text items?

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3

OK, one big honking Carousel. full-size images, sliding over each other one at a time. Standard Walter Carousel, just huge.

Yes you’ve said it HUGE

One BIG thing to think about when doing something like this - PAGE LOAD TIME

I suspect that visitors to this will not hang about if they are waiting for it all to load! - I don’t think it is practical to consider doing this. But I am sure Walter will enlighten us.

David

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4

http://luckypro.biz/client/walter/v4/01_portfolio/port-01_new.html

About ten seconds. And my ISP is no speed demon. I’ve waited for plenty of pages that long. Of course, some of these pages will have a lot more images. If the Carousel Action could be set to download on demand, that would be better. But I’ve got to work with what I can.

I’ve spent days trying to implement jQuery javascripts and oddball gallery makers. None of them work reliably, and none of them really give the effect I want. As said above, I traded emails with SlideShowPro. Can’t do what I want. Oh well. Neither, actually can the Carousel Action. But at least with it, I can get close to a clean design.

Now, If I could just get some captions integrated in the Carousel Action, that would be way cool.

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5

11 images and the Inspector says 12.36 seconds

So if you have 20 images then 20+ secs etc

All I was trying to say was that you implied you were going to use

One big honking Carousel. full-size images

And I was simply suggesting that too many images = too long a load time and departing visitors.

D

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6

And I appreciate the thought. If I could find some actually working technology that I could actually implement without losing what little hair I actually have left, I’d jump on it.

Do you have any suggestions for building a cross browser compatible scrolling carousel that will open large images in a DIV? (Not in one of those Lightbox/Thickbox cover up the page and let the underneath show through like cheap lingerie effect routines.) If so, I’d love to hear them!

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