Simpleviewer, Autoviewer for web galleries

[Henry Ambrose]

So, lets pretend that I can be happy with how the resulting pages look - (I can).

Are there any reasons to not use Simpleviewer or Autoviewer for my commercial web galleries?

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/autoviewer/

The Simpleviewer script for Photoshop sure makes a nice gallery and fast!

[Kerik Kouklis]

Henry,

I use simpleviewer on my website. Pretty easy and fast.

[tim atherton]

none at all

I've come across a number photographers sites which integrate simple viewer galleries and it looks good and works very well.

I've used it as a stand alone for some of my projects because it's quick, easy, clean and simple. I've received several comments on how it looks, as well ask queries on who built it for me...

e.g. www.timatherton.com

[Nate Battles]

Those look good to me. I guess the dimming feature on the autoviewer is sort of annoying. That's my opinion, but the interface seems really user friendly.

[ericantonio]

I use it, its great. Easy too.

[QT Luong]

Your image pages will not be indexed by search engines.

[Jeremy Moore]

You can also do some other things nowadays, such as simple roll over galleries:

http://www.jeremydmoore.com/

[Rob Champagne]

Your image pages will not be indexed by search engines.

There are quite a few myths about flash and search engines. Google actually tried to look inside flash files for a while and index the content. For a short while SWF files would appear in google searches. I think they gave up once they realised tracing the logic of actionscript and sub movies was a non starter for indexing. SWF files now seem to have disappeared from google results and google indexes flash only pages with all it has available to it which is meta tag information.
So that means flash pages will be indexed but if all images appear from within one flash movie then you only get one page of meta tag indexing for all images combined into one movie which isn't going to do you any favours in terms of search phrases which your page/site may be found on.

i.e. a pure flash site for a photo gallery is best reserved for sites where search engine position is not important for the site.

Simple Viewer is a very elegant solution and works well but with a couple of drawbacks.
First the search engine thing and secondly it loads all images in the gallery regardless of whether people look at them or not. For a small gallery of a few images that may not be a problem but a gallery of a hundred or more images is just wasting bandwidth unecessarily.

Best to create mini galleries using a different xml feed for each mini gallery and place each mini gallery in a separate html page. That way you can at least try some different meta tag indexing for each mini gallery.

Googles indexing criteria are not set in stone and they do regularly update them. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

I have written one site in pure flash which uses over 100 flash movies as feeds of content. There is no html body text in what is only a 7 html page site. It comes no1 in google for several highly relevant search phrases so don't believe everything you here about flash and seach engine indexing being a no no. But it will never be as good as it could be if it were not flash based.

Of course all that assumes you know enough about SEO to get your non flash page up there where it can be found. Most people fail on this prime requirement so infact it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether you write it in flash or not.

[QT Luong]

Well, the simple reason your *image pages* (eg: http://www.terragalleria.com/black-white/middle-east/israel/jerusalem/picture.isra10207-bw.html) won't be indexed is that there aren't any, only gallery pages (eg: http://www.terragalleria.com/black-white/middle-east/israel/jerusalem/jerusalem.html).

[Rob Champagne]

A page is a page. Its the content of the page which counts. An image is relatively insignificant as far indexing goes and falls into the same category (from my point of view) as a flash SWF file. i.e. google et al don't know whats in it or what its of.
The accompanying text is what is most important and combined with that or failing that then the meta tag information becomes the most significant thing on the page which a search can index on. So a zero text page with an image will be indexed according to whats in the meta tags assuming you have included them and maybe the img alt text but more likely the img title text or maybe a combination of the two.

[Henry Ambrose]

Good points QT and Rob.

I'll work on this some more and take your comments into consideration.
I'm thinking I have a way to get searchable material in the galleries. We'll see tomorrow.

[QT Luong]

> A page is a page.

Yes, but those who plan to obtain traffic through search engines (not necessarily a good idea) would be well served to study the two pages I gave.

[Photomax]

It all depends on what you need and what your comfort level is with doing the work yourself. The Simpleviewer type template is easy to use but there are a million pages out there that use the same system, which can make your site look like just like "one of the pack."

If you have a group of photos to display then it does take time for the Flash file or script to load. Folks with blazing internet speeds might look at these sites and ask "who cares?" but not everyone has fast speed connections. I am cheap and have slow DSL, which is faster than dial-up but way slower than cable modems etc.

For instance, Jeremy's site loaded slowly for me, so slow that I did not wait for any photos and gave up. The fact that the whole folder, code and the SWF has to load before the visitor will actually see anything is going to annoy some folks.

Flash heavy sites can be more about the snazzy interface than the content. A clean html page is only around 4-8K with a CSS style sheet that gets downloaded just once. You then add the image which can be anywhere from 20k-100K or more depending on size and compression. But the page and image will load fast and be "accessible" to all viewers without any plugins etc needed. Something to be said for that.

Having hand crafted pages allows for a unique style and design with search engine friendly captions and titles. Using this method does take a little work in the front end but once you have one page done perfectly it is pretty easy to cut and paste a line of code to create another gallery page.

[Jeremy Moore]

For instance, Jeremy's site loaded slowly for me, so slow that I did not wait for any photos and gave up. The fact that the whole folder, code and the SWF has to load before the visitor will actually see anything is going to annoy some folks. .

That's odd. My site includes no flash and is all CSS w/ 2 javascripts plus the pictures. The pictures that load up on the site are all under 40k except for larger images that only load when clicked on.

[Photomax]

Jeremy,

Sorry, I checked again. I see no images using Safari 2.04 on a Mac with DSL... Clicking on the TCP, Japan or ToyCameras links works but all I get is is the white box. No images.

But wait, it worked using Firefox. Nice images! I then tried again with Safari. For some reason it worked, but still slowly. The other problem is that the rollover effect of displaying the full size image bumps the image out of the white box into the left area when displaying horizontal images. The full size image partially overlaps the text box. So, obviously there is some full browser support issues...

Max

[Jeremy Moore]

I just demoed it in Safari yesterday so I'm confused. It has also been tested in Opera and IE with no problems (and firefox, which worked for you).