Sildeshow

Hello,

I’m working on revamping my daughters website, it has lots of pictures on it, each month since Dec 2004 is in galleries. I wanted to have a slideshow that gathers all the galleries and shows them so you can sit and watch them all. Problem is with Smoothbox it tries to load all the pictures (currently 800+ and i’m still adding more). That takes way to long to load. Anyway I can do a slideshow where it just loads each picture when it wants to go to it rather then having to download all the pictures?

I was just looking at this today. Add this to the snippet call

wouldn’t that just load all the 800+ pictures into the cache? Meanwhile the visitor sits and waits?

Maybe its my long experience of being a photojournalist but I would look at this problem from another angle.

You mention that your daughter’s site has 800 images in it? Thats a ton of pictures! When I go to someone’s online gallery or group page I usually wish they had edited the number of images way down to increase the overall impact. Many people upload every exposure that their digital cameras record and then ask people to check out their work.

What I am getting at is you might be doing better service to your daughters website overall if you created gallery groups that only contained the best photos. Doing so might increase visual appeal overall. No disrespect but who would want to sit through 800 images? Breaking it down to the "highlights" that are in topical sections would increase the chance that the wonderful photo, #763 will ever get seen.

Doing so would also eliminate the issues you are struggling with in getting MODx to work with the current image load...

Just my $.02

Max

Exactly. I had a similar problem 14 years ago when teaching online programming courses and managing 15 other "teachers" for the Imagination Network’s "Online University". It has to be interesting, fun, and fast-moving or you lose your "students". Television long ago knew the same principle.

It’s the same in writing. Short sentences, small paragraphs, get your point across in the first one or two paragraphs because that’s all the majority of your viewers will ever read. Details and supporting arguments follow for those interested in going deeper. This is a very common phenomenon; on Slashdot somebody will make a dumb comment, somebody else will remark that they obviously didn’t read the "fine article", and someone will reply to somebody else "You must be new here" because nobody reads the linked article.

Web users aren’t like a family sitting watching the slides of your last vacation - in other words, they can simply move on if things get tedious. And I don’t care how captivating the photography is, or how interested the viewer is in the subject, they are not going to sit through 800 photos.

So yes, sift out the best from each category for your slideshow, but you can certainly have links to other slideshows and archives.

Thanks for your replies and insight. I agree that at times ’less is more’, in this situation we have our families (mainly the grandparents) going to the site on a daily basis to check for updates and will go through all of the pictures. I already am reducing the amount of pictures so you don’t get 10 of the same exact picture except maybe her eye blinked...It still leaves lots of pictures. I think I am going to take the advice given and take the best of the best for the slideshow but keep the galleries intact. The interest is not to gain popularity through the site but share the images to those who are already interested, but I’ve learned a TON from using MODx and snippets like MaxiGallery etc.

Ah, where grandparents are concerned all the rules change