New Imgur album embeds

[smjjames]

Going back to the old design won't work, it'll get phased out. I've already contacted imgur to see if we can get a little more customizability on the albums. It's a waiting game now

@RIC: I'll look into the spoiler issue, but the old albums also didn't work nicely with them.

So Imgur is giving us no choice here essentially?

[raidernick]

It looks terrible and imgur should feel terrible. The worst part is that you have no idea what images are in an album anymore since there are no thumbnails and you can't just skip to an image in particular, you need to keep clicking next until you get to the one you want.

[sumghai]

All I ask is for the return of thumbnails. Otherwise, I'm okay with the changes.

[raidernick]

Not only does it look like garbage and if the album has a lot of images you need to click though like 300 of them to get to the end, but when you click the image instead of bringing you to the full sized image it brings you to an error page saying the image doesn't exist. Looks like it might be time to find a new image host.

[Starhawk]

The size is so small that it makes them almost unviewable for me.

Unfortunately this vastly reduces the attractiveness of much of the forum.

I expect that Imgur wants more click-throughs, but the deterioration in overall user experience seems to me to be a large issue.

Perhaps there are other photo-sharing services from which the forum might be able to display embedded albums.

[Robotengineer]

Looks like something that would be embedded in a tweet. Meh. I probably won't post albums until it gets fixed.

[TMS]

Another triumph for the mobile web over the forces of usability!

I'd just reimplement the old code and wait for the new design to be iterated into something usable.

Imgur won't phase out the old code overnight.

[raidernick]

Another triumph for the mobile web over the forces of usability!

I find it hilarious that all companies suddenly seem to be under the impression that nobody uses anything but mobile devices or computers for anything but posting to fb or twitter(although your average technologically illiterate idiot may do this I find it hard to believe these people are in the majority).

I agree use the old code until this "thing" is fixed or a suitable replacement host can be found.

[passinglurker]

Its a huge step back in usability it looks like something meant for phones which as usual looks and feels terrible on a real computer I need something bigger flashier and more presentable for my mod thread OP like the old album. Making potential downloaders switch between forum and imgur windows for a closer look isn't a good way to promote ones mod especially when a better more usable experience is fresh in everyone's memories.

[KasperVld]

I'm in contact with someone at Imgur. They're reading your feedback and I'm sending some as well. Keep it constructive and I'm sure it'll work out for everyone in the end

edit:

By constructive criticism I mean that rather than saying "I don't like this, you are bad and you should feel bad" you explain what you do and do not like, and how it can be improved upon. I've read some good suggestions about reintroducing the preview thumbnails for example, and perhaps a responsive design approach would improve the flexibility of the embeds across multiple devices.

Edited April 10, 2015 by KasperVld

[katateochi]

I'm in contact with someone at Imgur. They're reading your feedback and I'm sending some as well. Keep it constructive and I'm sure it'll work out for everyone in the end

@sarah plz!!

Well at least someone is listening. I guess the main gripe with it is lack of thumbnails and being forced to go to imgur to read extended text. Don't some companies block imgur at work, could cause a problem for some folk? (not trying to encourage KSP browsing while at work, but we all know that happens!)

Other gripes; It looks like a prototype and doesn't look like imgur, if not for the logo I'd think it was another image host's album. The next/prev links and image count under the current picture look really basic and waste space. the description would look much better directly under the image. why have two sets of navigation links, unless that's to cater for mobile users who don't have an onhover event. but in which case can't there be two styles one for mobile and one for desktop users? I'd suggest loosing the next/prev links under the image, having the image x of y count appear onhover along with the navigation arrows over the image, and make the navigation arrows bigger (wider but not full height).

positives; once loaded it does seem to cycle through the images faster.

Anyway, that's my $0.02

[passinglurker]

In order for it to be usable for presenting something on a forum it needs essentially what features that were dropped at least as that is the reader's of a post's expectations meaning more specifically...

1. being able to set a bigger size (or even better automatically fit to the width of a forum post on a normal computer screen.)

2. thumbnails

3. not having to click through imgur's official sight to see the full resolution or read the whole text

As for how albums can be improved from where they were before this change happened I don't know. I guess you can say I'm resistant to change but can you honestly blame me when change only seems to take away features, options, and customizations? This is why I stopped using linux when ubuntu's unity and gnome3 came around and refused to go windows 8 either because the changes offered took away something I already had and forced me into new interface I wasn't familiar with and unlike the last interface it was much more fixed and unchanging. Essentially the interface had become resistant to any change the user wished to put upon it.

[Starhawk]

Thanks Kasper!

I would have to say that both a much larger size and thumbnail functionality are critical features.

The thumbnails should be selectable and scrollable as in the previous interface, allowing the user to selectively view specific images easily.

Less waste space, and black/dark for the waste space makes the album much more viewable.

Happy landings!

[HafCoJoe]

Wow I've been cleaning a car all day and just got back to this page xD. 4 PAGES! One thing I never learned properly was how to manually re size imgur Albums. Would a mod please explain?

[nightingale]

I first saw this on my phone and thought, "hey, this looks pretty nice" and moved on. Now that I'm looking at it taking a mere quarter of the width of the screen on the desktop and it's really, really bad. I actually thought that the old ones were too small by default too (and found myself frequently clicking though to imgur to see smaller details).

[vexx32]

Wow I've been cleaning a car all day and just got back to this page xD. 4 PAGES! One thing I never learned properly was how to manually re size imgur Albums. Would a mod please explain?

There really isn't a neat way. Spoilers will apparently change the height of these new ones, albeit at the cost of making them completely broken to anyone using Firefox.

One thing you might want to try is putting the album embed code inside a table with only one cell in it, which can be most easily done from the Advanced Post Editor page. Tables's borders can be hidden and they can be resized easily enough, so that might be able to alter the way the imgur album is displayed.

[AndyMt]

Most things are already written in previous posts. My thoughts on this:

I Like:

- The new colour scheme, but the old one was ok, too

I'm ok with:

- Having to go to imgur to see the highres version

- having it smaller than the old version. But have it bigger as it is now, please.

I really, really miss:

- The scrollable preview thumbnails

- The descriptions

I selected the layout including the previews in imgur for my albums. I kind of expect them to look that way in the embedded version, too.

[JAD_Interplanetary]

My $0.02:

I like the white theme, but the layout is terrible:

* I don't like that I can't see the thumbnails

* The main picture is too small

* Clicking the picture takes you to imgur, not the next picture in the album

* Related to previous, the hit boxes for "prev" and "next" are too small and too close to the edges

* The menu for "view full resolution" is gone, you have to click through to imgur to get it

I prefer the old style layout, just with different styling to make it blend into the forum theme.

[katateochi]

There really isn't a neat way. Spoilers will apparently change the height of these new ones, albeit at the cost of making them completely broken to anyone using Firefox.

One thing you might want to try is putting the album embed code inside a table with only one cell in it, which can be most easily done from the Advanced Post Editor page. Tables's borders can be hidden and they can be resized easily enough, so that might be able to alter the way the imgur album is displayed.

I had a quick experiment with tables, but only using the basic text BBcode interface. Just putting it like this [noparse][table][tr][td]

Javascript is disabled. View full album

[/td][/tr][/table][/noparse] makes it smaller. Is there a way to set cell width in plain BBcode or do you have to use the advanced editor to do that?

[hoojiwana]

I had a quick experiment with tables, but only using the basic text BBcode interface. Just putting it like this [noparse][table][tr][td]http://imgur.com/a/Ct94g[/td][/tr][/table][/noparse] makes it smaller. Is there a way to set cell width in plain BBcode or do you have to use the advanced editor to do that?

You can use [table=width: 1100] and/or [td=width:500]. I'm not sure about single column tables but I use table width to set the max width and then alter the column width that the imgur album is in. My mod thread is a mess of BBcode since I didn't like the way the old albums had lots of filler space either side since they had a maximum height, I set it all up to try and reduce all the dead space on the page. Quote that first post and have a look at the BBcode for all the tables and such if you want to poke about further.

[John FX]

Can't say I am a fan of the new format but it's something that is going to happen so that's all there is it would seem.

[Starhawk]

Kasper,

Is there any word on improvements to the album embeds?

Happy landings!

[KasperVld]

Things like this don't happen overnight - Imgur is aware of the suggestions and it's up to them to take it from there

[micr0wave]

Basically it boils down to 'don't fix what isn't broken' .... but maybe they are just working on reducing traffic, pretty sure they're succesfull with this change

[Starhawk]

Things like this don't happen overnight - Imgur is aware of the suggestions and it's up to them to take it from there

Thanks. I apologize for my impatience.

Happy landings!