Lee.org

I switched from WP Lightbox JS to WP FancyZoom. I’m pretty sure its the right decision. I really like the idea of having the lightbox plugin resize the image according to the size of the user’s screen. That way, I can post things in full resolution and not worry that when the user clicks on a thumbnail, the image will expand so much that they have no idea what they are looking at (like one of those Games Magazine Eyeball Bender). I’m trying to future-proof the blog. It would be a shame in a few years if someone looked back on this site and was disappointed that the only copy of an image I had was a reduced-resolution image.

Upon installing it, I notice that when you open images that have text in them, the text isn’t nessesarily legible; it depends on how large your browser window is (example). Hmmm.. hmmm.

I very much like that FancyZoom pre-loads the full-size image when the user mouses-over the image. It makes load-times pleasantly quicker without any fuss for the user :-)

I’ll leave FancyZoom up for a while and see how I feel about it.

In FancyZoom.js, I changed the defaults to make image display speedy like so:

var zoomSteps = 2; // Number of zoom animation frames

I hope the author isn’t too disappointed in my choices here. Setting it like so almost completely eliminates the “super sexy” zoom effect that he is proud of (read the docs, he’s really happy with it!). But it does what I want it to do and I am thankful! That single intermediary image that flashes in the window for just a few milliseconds hints at what’s going on very well without taking up too much time.

(image via)