All in All, It’s Just Another Brick in the Photo Wall

I like being CEO, because when I’m not smoking a Cuban while drinking my third martini, I have time to ponder how we display and interact with images on the web.

It was in one of these vermouth-induced hazes that I realized how most photography websites present a single image on the homepage…as if a single image is supposed to encompass the breadth of our work and illustrate our diversity and creativity! Nay, my friend, it does not.

Showing a bunch of galleries as thumbnails is a potential solution because it’s an easy way to convey lots of information in a compact space (and in fact, this is an option on PhotoShelter). The only problem is that the presentation of thumbnails is often staid and boring, and sometimes you might want to be a little more selective about the galleries you display [see portfolio].

But what if there was a way to use a feed of your feature galleries, and have some control around their appearance. Set them free! Hey teachers! Leave those galleries alone!

[Enter Photo Wall, stage left]

As a part of our Festive Fall 6-Pack, we’re excited to release the Photo Wall. It’s a third option for your homepage in addition to the Slideshow and the Featured Galleries. You can select the galleries you want to display, and then configure the appearance of the thumbnails.

Here’s a version with squares and no padding between images, using my Featured Galleries as a source.

Here’s a version using fixed aspect ratio rectangles and 3 pixels of padding.

Here’s a version using the natural aspect ratio with a corner radius and making the “small featured galleries” half the size of the large ones. I love the abstract shape that the different aspect ratios create.

As you could probably guess, we don’t use Flash to do this, which means you can tweak the appearance of certain items using CSS. In the Maui – Funhouse style, we override the default behaviors to persistently display the title with a little blue ribbon background.