Our slide show tool is going to see big changes.
It's important to know that your current slide shows tools (both active and inactive) will be upgraded to the new tool, and there may be some changes with captions and transitions you may want to adjust. If you are using captions on your current slide show, please be sure to read our Caption Changes article.
Why The Change?
In a nutshell, the tool has been updated to use a modern code that is cross-platform, cross-browser compatible. In other words, this tool will now work better on more devices. The continuing influence of mobile, tablet, small screens and touch screens is changing how web design and web development is done. This tool meets current best practices and technologies.
What's Changing?
Beside the technical code, here are the exciting features and highlights:
- New transitions! (more on this below)
- New ways of displaying captions (captions are still optional)
- New controls! Many more options and choices
- You can set the maximum number of active slides, still allowing for more inactive slides to be added for easier rotation and updating of the slide show
- Automatic generation of thumbnails! One less step!
- Less steps in the upload of new images - more streamlined process
- New "floating" update slide button within functional pane - easier to see that you have changes to save now
New Transition Properties (settings)
You may notice that there are some new additions to the transitions and that some transitions have been removed. If your slide show was using one of the transitions that was removed, it was automatically moved to the fade transition. You can go into the tool, update the properties to something else.
Most of the transitions are self-explanatory, but there is one very unique transition: Carousel.
Carousel
Carousel is a special transition that works like a continual ribbon or "film strip". The images are seamed together and advance in small increments, instead of transitioning an entire slide. Depending on the size of your images and the available space on your web page you'll be able to see sections of 3 or more slides at any given time.
The carousel transition only works well with vertical or square images, and they must be smaller to work well. Larger images that take up the entire space of your web page (main body area) will defeat the purpose of the carousel. You also need to have your images cropped or sized the same.
The carousel is ideal for featuring upcoming events, advertisements or promotions, and a fun way to show off new photos, or to engage your visitors with photos that should be in a sequence - such as a time sequence or first, second, third type of progress. And it works well on a mobile and tablet too!
You want to experiment with adding captions and navigation controls to a carousel. Not all controls will look - or work - well on a carousel, depending on the size of your images and other tool property settings. Take a look a few carousel slide show screenshot examples below.
This is an example of square photos in a main body area. Note how in this example, you can fully see 2 images, and the start of a third image.
In the example above, the use of circle controls isn't working out the best, but by simply switching the controls to thumbnails (or even none), you can achieve a much better look.
In the above example, you have uniformly cropped images, small enough to fit several images across the web page, and then the use of thumbnail controls for the user to control the slide show.
New Display Properties
We touched on this above, but there are many new and updated Display Properties now! It's best to explore all of these to see what works for your site and your images, but here are a few highlights.
- Captions have changed and can now be overlay, below the slide show or a simply slide count. The slide count is a "caption" display but not one where you add text.
- If you have our mobile optimized site, all captions are automatically overlays for the mobile site.
- Controls - many new and updated options! New includes the ability to add circles, numbers and thumbnails.
Not all controls and captions work with all transition and image sizes. We encourage you to take time to explore the new properties and how the combination of different settings looks with your images, image sizes and the available space on the web page for your slide how.
When using Thumbnails as a display control (user controls), thumbnails are automatically generated and are kept in the same aspect ratio as the original image. So if you upload a mix of horizontal and vertical oriented photos, you'll have a mix of thumbnails.
This example shows the thumbnail controls being used with a variety of image sizes and orientations:
Important Caption Changes
If you are using captions on your existing slide shows, your captions may not display correctly in the enhanced tool. Please see this article for more details.
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