22Slides

Five years ago today, we launched 22Slides with modest expectations and the intention of providing the best service we possibly could. Now, our clients span over 60 countries and we’re happy to be able to say we still offer the same one-on-one experience as always. Rather than celebrating too much though, we’re working hard on new stuff to be released soon, but in the meantime, here’s what’s new:

New Image Gallery Layout

We introduced a new “Blocks” image gallery layout, which allows for large thumbnails and perfectly-aligned negative space all the way around your page. Check it out by viewing one of your image galleries in your design editor.

Free Domain Names

We’re very happy to announce that our friends at Hover.com have been kind enough to offer free domain names (for one year) to 22Slides customers. So if you haven’t bought yourself a custom domain name for your website, now’s the time to do it. Go to your settings page, then click “setup a custom domain”. It’ll guide you through the process.

We made a few display and usability improvements to image gallery pages too.

• The ESC and ↓ keys will now close photo overlays/lightboxes.
• A new “X” button has been added to overlays/lightboxes too, to make it dead obvious how to close an image.
• We added support for non-square Instagram photos.
• Image descriptions now respect line breaks.

New “Updates” Page

Rather than send emails or write blog posts about every little change we make to our system, we’ve introduced a new “updates” page to the control panels. Whenever there’s a new feature or a change made, there will be a small green circle at the top of your control panel to let you know. You can click the circle and see exactly what we’ve been working on.

Image Handling Improvements

Image upload speed has been improved 300% by adding more servers to handle the files, and we now automatically wipe out all image metadata so you don’t have to worry about people decoding your files to try and find out your settings and post-processing workflow. We DO, however, still keep ICC profiles so everything is still displayed as intended.

Lots of Other Stuff

• A revised sign in page now makes it easy to find and reset your password.
• New, even stronger military-grade password encryption and an improved password reset process have been implemented.
• We added the sender’s IP address to emails sent from a contact form, so you can find information about anyone trying to send anonymous messages.
• New receipt/reminder emails are now sent each month, to ensure no one is ever paying for an account they forgot they had.
• We redesigned the “content” page, improving the appearance of your pages, as well as making the drag-and-drop functionality work much better.
• We now keep closed/cancelled accounts around for 3 months instead of the previous 2, to provide a longer grace period should a client change their mind.
• We made improvements to page redirects to help new sites retain maximum SEO performance when making major changes.
• We added a new optional EU cookies law-compliant notice for those of you in Europe, which can be found on your settings page.