SmartGallery Homepage

Introduction

This photo presentation system is fully client based and can be set up with ease. It uses 2 browser windows. A thumbnails page with small images organized in rows and columns and a framed page which consists of a big image area and a button area. This second page holds all information about status, and provides a browser based history of all images which can be browsed forth and back.

While a big image is viewed, the next one in order of the thumbnails page is loaded in the background. The appropriate "next" button has another colour and the background of the image area also.

When the user is returning to the thumbnails page (click on the big image), he or she can select another image for big representation. This time (only here), a pop-up window informs about a preselect opportunity. When the user confirms this, the thumbnails pages provides in preselecting images. Preselected images become a thick border. The framed page is entered when an already bordered image is clicked again. At this time, small bandwidth equipped users (or pages with > 500 kB/image) will profit: The selected pages are shown in order and the preload feature works accordingly.

Important feature:

Thumbnails can be spread over several pages provided they are linked. Technical detail: activating a link on a page destroys current javascript variables and objects. The framed big-image page records this and restores the references of the new thumbnails page content to the framed page. This conserves all of the information of the system (e.g. the history of all viewed content). The user can thus browse through all magnified images offline when he/she has loaded more than one thumbnails page.

Further characteristics:

This web page is tested with IE5&6, Mozilla 1.6 and Opera 7.
The files that make up the gallery system can be downloaded as a zip package from the Sourceforge Project page. A manual is included as well as hints for potential contributors in further programming.

Known Problems:

Future ideas:

Note: Programming in Javascript is weird. Not because of Javascript itself, but because of its lack in consistence accross different browsers. A few peculiarities and some useful links are provided here.


Project Site: Sourceforge.net/projects/smartgallery