Flickorama update
I’ve spent more time on Flickorama aesthetics last week. Here is the latest screenshot:
New Features:
- Slideshow thumbnail photo strip
- Large Photo View
- Full Screen View
- Link to the photographer’s photostream
- Photo highlights, transparency, borders, drop shadows and typography enhancements
Slideshow Photo Strip
The most notable change is the new slideshow control bar at the bottom of the application screen:
You’ll notice large Start Slideshow (play) button on the left and a scrollable photo strip control with thumbnails from the currently displayed photo set. The photo strip control will display left and right scroll buttons automatically if all the thumbnails from the currently displayed photoset don’t fit on your screen. Photo strip scrolling is enabled on mouse over. You still need to click on the Next/Previous Set buttons to load photo sets.
The photo strip is fully synchronized with the OpenFlux PlexiGlass list view. So, when you shuffle images in the main 3D view by dragging images around, you’ll notice they are shuffled in the photo strip as well.
I also added photo highlighting and tooltips that display photo title and clearly indicate the selected photo in PlexiGlass list view and photo strip. In addition, the slideshow control bar, buttons and image boxes now have a refined treatment of borders, transparency, caption display with text truncation, drop shadows and glow filters.
Large Photo View
I am still not completely satisfied with the Large Photo view, but the latest version has some new features that make it more flexible and usable for the slideshow and different 3D photo set layouts. Here is the snapshot of the Large Photo View canvas:
When you click on the selected photo or double click on the photo thumbnail, the Large Photo view is displayed. This photo view canvas is draggable and you can reposition it in the main view to place it in the most convenient location. You can also toggle between medium (500×500) and large (750×750) photo view by double-clicking on the Large Photo image.
The caption box in the Large Photo view displays photo title, date taken, and has a link to the photographer’s photostream. The photostream link opens new browser window and links directly to the flickr photostream page for now. I plan to extend this feature to load the original photographer’s photostream in Flickorama in the future.
Full Screen View
The top application control bar has two new buttons: Large Photo on the left and Full Screen View button on the right:
The Large Photo button opens the Large Photo View and Full Screen button allows to break out of the browser window and view Flickorama full screen.
The toggle buttons in the middle are for switching between the different 3D Photoset Layouts. The currently supported layouts are:
I am considering adding Book, Sphere and Collage photo set layouts eventually.
Under the Covers
Quite a few changes, bug fixes and enhancements were added behind the scene. Images are now pulled directly from flickr without an extra pass through the image proxy on my server. I also switched to using Ely’s Super Image for image loading and caching. Image caching and direct loading from flickr gave flickorama a noticeable performance boost.
I still need to play a little with image caching settings and profile the whole application. It performs well for a casual user, but you might encounter problems if you go through over a thousand of photos.
I am planning to add Advanced Search options and Tag Cloud, generated from the currently displayed photo set, to provide extra search and explore options.
Other ideas:
- Going AIR :)
- Multi-tab Flickorama
- Save your favorite pics and searches
- Geo-search
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