Hey everyone,
As
previously discussed here, right now the album dimensions must be smaller than the image dimensions for an image to load. Here's how it works:
We assumed that since this was a photo album service, and that the vast majority of photos uploaded these days are larger than 1000px on the longest size, we felt that basing the default photo album on this size would be safe. When you upload a photo to your album, it gets resized as follows:
- large: 940 on longest side
- medium: 460 on longest side
- small: 220 on longest side
- album: 160x160 (centered, crop edges)
- thumbnail: 100 on longest side
- square: 75x75 (centered, crop edges)
This is so we have all the sizes we need to display in the Albums tab, and also various sizes for use in the albums you create. The important thing here is the resizing only goes down, not up. So if you upload a small photo, say 720x540, the resizer only makes smaller versions.
What happens when you view an album at the default size (940x744) any images that are smaller than that size are not loaded. This is so small images aren't stretched to a larger size and distorted.
We've been looking at a few options on how to handle this:
1. Make the default size smaller. This is quite easy to do, but we feel that most of the time you want a small gallery because you're embedding it in another page, and there is already a size control in the embed function (fully customizable in fact).
2. Allow you to change the size of the "full page" album in the album settings. This is also pretty easy, but it doesn't solve the issue of photos that are smaller than the size you choose not showing up. The "full page" album already supports custom sizes, all you need to do is add a query string to the album URL. Then you can set the size of the album to whatever you like.
Try it like this:
?size=custom&width=400&height=300
...so your URL would be something like...
http://progrower.coffeecup.com/albums/g … height=300
3. Stretch images to fit whatever size album you create. So even if the image is 320x240, it will be stretched to a larger size, quite possibly distorting and pixelating it.
The best solution is probably some mix of the above, and maybe some other things. The main reason we wanted to give Albums to you Total Pro customers and Ambassadors is because you're are best customers and we want to see how you actually used albums before making more assumptions.
So, now that you've had a chance to play with it, what do you feel is best? How can we make it better and easier to use?