My Portfolio with Backlight…

User Showcase
#1

Hello, I have reworked my portfolio page with Backlight 4.

It is currently only in German, I am still working on the English version.

Anyone want to take a look?

I would be very happy about feedback!

Thanks!!

#2

Looks good to me. You’re keeping things pretty straight forward, and I think the simplicity helps to get visitors right into your images.

I personally don’t love the text-shadow effect on the masthead and breadcrumbs, but that’s entirely subjective.

#3

I’m with Matthew on the dropped shadow text. It makes me think I need to go to the opticians and looks at odds with the sharpness of the rest of the site.
TomO

#4

Thanks for your feedback Matthew!

Yes, I compared the fonts again. Fits really better without shadow :)!!

And thanks to the really ingenious functions of backlight easy to switch over :)!!

Thanks very much!

2 Likes
#5

Hi Tom, thanks for looking.

I turned shadow off again :). you don’t need glasses anymore :slight_smile:

Thank you!!

1 Like
#6

I can see the breadcrumbs no longer have dropped shadows but the masthead does. I’ve flushed my browser cache here and the masthead dropped shadows persist.
TomO :eyeglasses:

#7

The home page takes an incredible amount of time to load and some galleries take a long time to populate a page with thumbnails and I have a reasonable fast broadband connection here.

#8

Thank you Tom!

I’ve noticed the loading time as well. At Home, this is probably due to the Flexstrip add-on. I actually quite liked it, but I think I’ll replace it with a single image. I haven’t noticed the loading time of the galleries yet. I have to look again. Some galleries have quite a lot of pictures…

Thank you for your feedback!!

#9

can you tell me in which gallery you noticed the loading times?

#10

I thought it was just my internet connection that made your entire site so slow for me.

Your thumbnail rendition size is a quite a bit bigger than what you really need.

#11

Thank you Rod

what would be the best setting for the thumbnail rendition based on your experience?

Thank you!!
[/quote]

#12

Reduced the settings for the thumbnail rendition. Should be faster now.

and on the home I replaced the flexstrip addon with a single image.

Thank you!!

#13

The Hamburg galleries were particularly slow and so far Dortmund was the slowest taking over 20 seconds to populate the page and that is after your changes. Obviously some of the pages are now cached so I have tried to look at others.
You have a vast number of images on the site and in my opinion and that is just my perspective, I think you could edit the gallery content down to fewer images. I think that would help with page loading and also with keeping a visitor interested. As I say that is just an opinion but I think less is more from a content perspective.
Editing a series is always difficult and unless an image has to be included say for a client to choose then reducing the content to a visual narrative of cohesive images always works best but is very difficult to achieve.
When I was studying for my degree in photography I was always advised to be prepared to ‘kill my babies’ in the final edit to make it work. I try to employ this ethic most of the time with my galleries :roll_eyes:.
Hope that helps?
TomO

#14

Thanks for your comments Tom!!

Yes, that helps me a lot! Yes, some galleries are probably a bit overloaded.

But I have a base now and will go through the galleries one by one.

Thank you Tom!!

#15

Hi,

Here’s a thumbnail from one of your galleries:

1024×678 463 KB

Quite a large thumbnail image!

So, a couple of things …

  1. If you change the size of your image renditions, you will need to re-upload your image files, as we only regenerate the image renditions on upload.

  2. You’re running Backlight 4, so please ensure you are running the latest version of Backlight 4 (visit the Backlight Modules page in your admin to install updates).

  3. If using Lightroom’s Publish Services, download and update to the latest version of our Publish Services plugin! Adobe changed their API several months ago, breaking older versions of the plugin, such that it would ignore rendition sizes and upload overly large images.

  4. Bear in mind that we do lazy-load thumbnails in the grid, so the total number of images on the page shouldn’t cause much slow down, at least for the initial page load. More images will load in as your scroll down the page. So if your pages are slow to load, better to look at image sizes, rather than number of images.

Your thumbnails are 200px wide; accounting for 2x Retina displays, you should export images 400px wide for best appearance. Your thumbnail image above is a whopping 1024px!

#16

Hi Matthew!

Thank you for your explanations!! That helps me alot!!

I didn’t realize that I would have to upload the images again if I changed the rendition.

I have the current version of backlight 4, also use the Lightroom service.

I’ll take a look at all of this again thanks to your explanations.

That helped me alot!!

Thank you!!

1 Like