Here is something I’ve been looking at the last few days. A ‘polaroid viewer’ plugin that you can use with WordPress.

I can see how this would be a nice way of displaying a bunch of ‘event’ type photos for someone to browse through. It seems much more interactive and fun than a page of tiny thumbnails staring you in the face.

In the previous post I was testing this and some other variations to display photos. I wanted to find some workable options for a photo-blog site. Even though I’ve only worked with these systems for a few days, I am quite impressed.

Since time flies on the ‘Net, I will probably have this post and the previous one up for a while in their ‘test’ state. When I have some final positive results, I’ll move things to a separate page to keep as a reference guide. It will take at least a number of hours to work through all the options and configuration possibilities on these plugins.

Be warned: It will probably take a few minutes to load the photos below if you are on a fast connection to the Net. And a LOT longer on dial-up. I’ll be changing this soon, but I want see actual load times. (Patience is a virtue. [grin])

[polaroid=3,520,520]

To use this viewer, click to drag and move the photos. Double-click on a photo to expand or collapse. Drag out the ?-mark in the upper left hand corner for help. In some of the tests below I am using some of my low resolution kitchen photos to test different options.

For the viewer above I am currently using about 30 fairly high resolution photos. I want to see how this works. Most of the photos are sized at 1200 X 800 pixels. That’s larger than they would need to be (the viewer is sized at 600 x 550 pixels) and the images are 455 x 455 px, but I want to check load times and how responsive it is.

One ‘feature’ of the viewer is that it ‘writes’ the file name at the bottom of polaroid. In checking, it seems that there is about a 50 character maximum before the name is truncated. Also, the minimum height of the viewer probably needs to be at least 550 pixels. I want to do some more testing at other screen resolutions.

And the actual displayed image is approx 455 x 455 pixels. So I would assume that would be the appropriate size for uploaded photos using this.

And here’s a quick test of the viewer sized at 455 x 520 which looks like the minimum size where you can still see the entire photo when one is maximized. (This size does cut off the bottom of the ‘polaroid’ and part of the file name would not be visible if it required two lines to display.)

[polaroid=2,455,520]

(Updated: 3/9/08: See this page with a ‘cleaner’ display of the photo display options and links for further information.)

This will be a constantly revised ‘draft’ post for a few days. I know, I know, don’t do that! But I am going to anyway as I test some photo display options. The options for setting the display style are here. And here is a tutorial. And a link to the Thickbox site.
Here is a link for info on the Polariod option.

Option 1: Display thumbnails with link option to view as a slideshow:

[View with PicLens]

Option 2: View as a slideshow.
See the Option 2 slideshow example on this WordPress page. (This option is buggy in IE when a slideshow is used in a post.)

Option 3: Single Picture