light box or gallery questions for an art website

[Jay Davis]

Hey guys, I'm enjoying self publishing with BlueVoda/VodaHost.

My site is www.jaywatercolor.com .

Obviously, my website is going to be picture heavy, and I want the pics to be of good quality. But also, obviously, I want to make sure the pages load fast enough for the average viewer.

I have used the pics resizer on one page, the "more nature paintings" page. It only seems to load slightly faster.

1. Do you guys have an recommendations for making the pages load faster, but maintain a high quality of the image (the pop up full size image, of course)?

2. Would using a light box (I'm experimenting right now) versus a gallery have any effect on the speed of the page loading?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, my site is very much a work in progress!

Thanks, Jay

[Bethers]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

In using gallery - are you checking the box to have the thumbnails for the smaller pics? That will increase load time - and then the larger image doesn't even have to be rsized.

[zuriatman]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Hi,

My choice is the lightbox over the gallery over the way the picture present itself for viewing. The adjustable thumb is generated automatically
when you upload to your album in BV.

If you are showing artwork you should not reduce the quality of the artwork by reducing the number of colors selected for display.

I recommend that you use the ".JPG" format for your artwork.

To speed up loading time limit the size of your display to 500 max pixel in height and ensure that the width remains equally as low as possible which should allow for a display of your artwork which your viewers can appreciate and a reasonably quick loading time.

You can use .Png or .gif if you want to animate your artwork.

Check out my orchid gallery below to get a better picture of what I am talking about.

Here is a link which you can also use

[Bethers]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Both the gallery and lightbox have good features. I won't presume one would be better or worse for someone else. The gallery feature works best for my products - most of the time. The lightbox might on other occasions. I've found the gallery loads faster (in my own experience only - haven't looked into why).

I recommend you try both and see which works best for you.

[Tom vR]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

I'm using the lightbox on almost every page, but after concerns by Collectersinfo, I have done some experiments myself. Although the lightbox generate its "own" thumbnails, the thumbnails are the same file size as the larger images. Thus not faster than the gallery given by Bethers.

On DynamicDrive.com Image Effects page are some preloading slideshows. I want to use some of them as in today already.

[Collectors-info]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Hi, if you are using one of the BV image viewers for showing, I would personally use the gallery (As Beth suggested) & remember to tick the thumbnail box to reduce the kbs on the thumbnail.
The light box is fine for a few images, but not for a gallery. As on previous posts the thumbnails stay the same size as the large image, so there is not actually much point in having a distorted thumbnail & not gaining any speed advantage.
The other alternative is to make your own thumbnails & have a popup of the larger image. A few forum members have done this & had a nice fast loading pages with good enlargements.
Also! Using something like JAlbum.com. This will do most of the work for you & give very good results.
With the images you have, you haven’t reduced the physical size of the images, so they are still slow loading. This will bring them down to around 2-300 kb each.

Good luck.

[Jay Davis]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Thanks so much guys for taking the time to reply. I'll experiment with these options and see what happens.

-Jay

[Supermax]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Hi there!
I recommend you to check out JAlbum.
It`s free and have many skins and some of them might be just what you are looking for.
Register,login to the forums and read or ask your question.
They are very helpfull in the forum.

http://jalbum.net/

[proactivator]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Having read through this thread some of you have mentioned the JAalbum skins. I have had this download on my PC for sometime. Is it possible to to use of these skins instead of lightbox in bluevoda (they have a lightbox 2 now)? If so, is it a straightforward thing to do? Believe me it has to be straightforward as far as I am concerned!

[Collectors-info]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Hi, for a photo/image album its a great bit of software. But if i remember! your were selling from your site?? & the JAlbum might not be so suitable unless using the skins with a cart built in. (These are not free). You can add a link to each image to a popup page, but i havnt tried a PP/Button as yet.
PS. you sig/link dosnt seem to work?

[proactivator]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Hi Chris,
At present I have a page of thumbnails on my products page: each thumbnail then links to a page with a couple of large photos of that particular item, plus description, price, etc. and in turn links to paypal should the visitor wish to purchase. I may want to replace the 2 large photos with shots from each side (so that means at least 4 photos) and a slide show would work well for this. Lightbox would work fine but JAlbum has other skins that I prefer. How does one go about downloading each mini album to it's relevant page in blue voda if JAlbum is used?
Regards,
James.

[Collectors-info]

Re: light box or gallery questions for an art website

Hi, the only way i can think of doing this, is to have the album in an iframe. This works fine with JAlbum, but you have to be careful of the size of the enlarged images do not exceeding the frame size. This one
is in an iframe & seems to work fine.
Remember that you can use jalbum for 30 meg of photo albums free of charge. Might be handy.