Richard Flynn :: no comment

I suspect that some people are poking through teeny-tiny photos and thus getting something far from the best experience. So, a few tips to increase your photo-viewing pleasure:

1. When looking at a photo, click on it. The photo will then open as big as your screen will allow. Squint no longer. Or squint less, at least. If you click on the enlarged photo again, it will disappear and leave you back where you started.
2. When you’ve blown up a photo like this you can then select alternative sizes from the list along the top: the biggest size available is called X3 (as in ‘XXXL’). If you choose that, you will be able to use the horizontal and vertical scrollbars in your browser to pan around the image.
3. You can also use the left and right arrows on your keyboard to navigate between photos within an album. This even works when you’ve enlarged a photo as described above: if you press the right arrow on your keyboard, it will open the next photo in the sequence already enlarged.
4. When looking at the ordinary view (without an enlarged photo in the way) you can click on the button labelled ‘Map this’. A new window/tab will then open with a map from Google Maps showing where each photo was taken. Cool, huh? You can drag the map around with your mouse, change from the default ‘Satellite’ view to ‘Map’, and zoom in and out using the control at the top-left of the map panel (but you can’t use your mouse scroll-wheel to zoom as you can on Google Maps’ own site). Some disclaimers: sometimes it just doesn’t work, even though it should—for example, at the moment the Texas and Arizona gallery isn’t showing geodata. Also, some photos won’t appear on the map, because there is no geodata for them: this is often the case for photos taken indoors, where my GPS tracker can’t get a fix on the positioning satellites, or for those photos where (for whatever rare reason) I didn’t in fact have the tracker with me and turned on.
5. There is another button next to ‘Map this’, called ‘Style’. Clicking on that brings up a menu from which you can choose different ways of viewing the gallery. The ‘Journal’ option is, in my opinion, an excellent way of browsing my photos. Try it out—make your browser window as big as possible for the best effect. I have vacillated about making it the default option, but it has some downsides, including the fact that you can’t make the photos any bigger than just fitting into your browser window (unlike the way I described above). You can easily change back to the default view-style, which is ‘SmugMug’. Your browser will remember which view-style you were last on the next time you come to look at my photos.