Collected comments

Hi Joe,

here comes a rather long "collected comments" on various Pixory 
topics. They all relate to version 2.12 as I am still a little bit 
hesitant to install a newer version until the ignore subfolders and 
the discoloured pictures issues have been resolved. Please bear with 
me if I comment on something you have fixed in later versions. 

1) For each album it is possible to specify the number of rows and 
columns to use per page for the album index. However, as I have 
earlier commented, it is currently not possible to enter a number 
higher than 5 in these selections boxes. Since I am using small 
thumbnails (75) I would like to use at least a 8 columns times 10 
rows layout. Actually, I would really like to set the "rows per page" 
selection to "unlimited", giving my viewers the possibility to load 
all thumbnails and just use the vertical scrollbar instead of 
manually paging through the pages. Most of my viewers want to look at 
all thumbnails anyway, but only clicks into some of the pictures.

I realise that with more thumbnails (even with small ones) the load 
on the pixory server will be momentarily higher when all thumbnails 
are loaded (or reloaded when going "up" again, depending on the cache 
setting in the client), but I think it would still be nice if it was 
left for me to decide if this server load is OK.  If you think there 
are serious reasons for not allowing the above "extended rows/columns 
settings", please explain?

2) A related topic is the top level index, where there are no 
corresponding row/column settings (or thumbnail size setting). In a 
way you could say that the top level index have the parameters 
hardcoded as "150 pixels thumbnail, 4 columns, unlimited rows". 
Currently I have about 150 albums, with a growing rate of about 3 
albums per week, and one day I might want to somewhat limit the 
number of pictures loaded for the top level page. Have you considered 
adding these attributes to the top level?

3) Another "top level" issue: The sorting is based on the date of the 
album pictures. But sometimes I have two albums from the same day 
(skiing in the morning, climbing in the afternoon), and it seems to 
me that Pixory in this case uses the album directory name 
for "subsorting". I would prefer to have all albums sorted after 
date, and in this case time also, so that the chronology is 
consistent.

4) I have all my thumbnail settings as "quality", but in the .album 
directory there are always two versions of the top level 150 pixels 
thumbnails (medium and high). Clearing the thumbnails and letting 
Pixory create new ones does not help. Is this a bug?

5) When I login to Pixory the top level album sorting seems to be 
a "name sorting", not "reverse date sorting" as for the viewer, and 
since my directories are named as "YYMMDD Topic" the pictures I add 
is always last in the list. If I add two albums I need to scroll 150 
albums down until I can get into the first one and configure it. When 
I go back I need to do the same scrolling before I can go into the 
next album. It would be nice with a sorting attribute (name, name 
reverse, date, date reverse, ...), even if I can live with the 
current sorting. :-)

6) I have the "image size" set to 600 to make it possible to see both 
portrait and landscape pictures on a normal 1024x768 screen without 
the need to scroll down. However, if I add a lot of text to the 
pictures the text will not be visible without scrolling. On the other 
hand, since screens are wider than they are high there will always be 
plenty of space at the left or right side of the picture where the 
caption and narrative could be displayed. Have you considered adding 
an album attribute for "caption and narrative position" (above, 
below, left, right)? Also if you use the "right" (or "left") option 
then of course the picture should not be centered on the screen, but 
put more on the left (or right) side.

7) When I access my albums (as a viewer) through a proxy I noticed 
that it takes longer time, and sometimes Pixory seems to "halt" for 
10-20 seconds before continuing. When I looked into the logs, I saw 
that with proxy access every thumbnail (or picture) was fetched 
twice, with a few seconds between the "double fetches". Without proxy 
the thumbnails/pictures are only fetched once. Is this known "bug" (I 
assume that it has to do with the "last modified" setting for the 
pictures being reported as "Unknown")?

8) About hierarchical albums: Yes please! I saw that you are thinking 
on how to handle the user interface, so here are some suggestions: 
Currently when you are looking at an album you have the album title 
(e.g. "My vacation") at the top left corner. You could easily(?) use 
a recursive description style here, where each title is clickable. An 
example with two sub-levels:

My vacation
   New York
      At the opera

To make this more consistent you could consider adding "Home", 
or "Top", as the first line:

Home
   My vacation
      New York
         At the opera

This could be combined with an "up arrow icon". A minor negative side 
of the idea of a recursive title display is that the picture area 
will be slightly smaller, but I think that is a price most of us sub-
album fans will be ready to pay.

When looking inside an album with one or more sub-albums, I think 
that you should mimic the behaviour of Windows Explorer; i.e. the 
first entries are the cover thumbnails for the sub-albums (with the 
same info and text as on the top level today), then the thumbnails of 
the ordinary pictures (if any) follows. Maybe you could emphasize the 
current top-level "shadow effect" for the sub-album thumbnails even 
more, thus making it clear that these are sub-albums? Perhaps 
a "double shadow" which gives the impression of multiple pictures?

I have seen that viewers using Pixory their first time often selects 
the "house icon" when they in fact only wants to get from the single-
picture mode up one level (to the thumbnails). I THINK that this 
could be due to the fact that in Windows Explorer you only have 
an "up icon", not a "home icon", and in some way the viewers feel 
that the "house icon" should take them up one level (towards "home")? 

The "four squares icon" might be even more cumbersome to understand 
for the viewer when you have sub-albums, and thus thumbnails at 
several levels. You could consider skipping the "house icon" and 
the "four squares icon" completely, having the "up arrow icon" 
(together with the recursive title list) as the only ways to go 
upwards?

If you go for an "up arrow icon", you might consider to use a 
different symbol for the "download album" since the up- and down-
arrow will have completely different scopes. Maybe some kind 
of "WinZip icon", or a "hard-disk icon" could be used? By the way, 
you could consider a check-box in the download pop-up window, 
specifying if only the current level pictures should be downloaded, 
or if the complete tree should be downloaded.

OK, thats pretty much sums up me experience after using Pixory some 
time now. Hope you still manage to enjoy some "Pixory-free time" at 
least one day per week!

/Gunnar




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