22Slides

Thanks to all our great clients sharing the word about 22Slides, we’ve slowly been able to increase our image limits to accommodate larger catalogs.

When we first started, the limit was set at 200 images. Today we’ve raised the limit from 750 to an even 1000.

And as a reminder, if you need more than 1000 images, you can always use our Flickr add-on to get practically an unlimited number of photos on your site for free.

Bigger, Customizable Image Sizes

Want bigger images? Go to your new “Settings > Image Settings” page and set your size limits to whatever you like. Our previous limit was around 1100x675px, but now you can go as big as 1800x1200, filling up the entire screen of almost every size monitor.

Retina Support

Bigger images mean higher resolution, especially for smaller screens like the Retina MacBook Pro. Using our largest image settings now means images are 2x the resolution on the 13“ MBP and at least 1.7x resolution on the 15”. Images appear much more crisp, just as they should on Retina devices.

Resizable & Adjustable Thumbnails

Now you can change the size and spacing between the thumbnails on your website, to create a wide array of different looks. Want huge thumbnails? Just go to the design editor, right click, and make them bigger.

Improved Image Quality

Yet again we’ve improved image quality. This time, by using new resampling algorithms that better-retain edge sharpness without also exaggerating unwanted detail. The result is crisper edges and less noise in your images.

Other Stuff

• “Tiles” thumbnail galleries now automatically center themselves on the page, if the rest of your site is centered.
• You can now click to navigate to the next image in sideways-scrolling galleries.
• Emails sent via contact forms now include the sender’s IP address, to offer some accountability to those looking to send anonymous messages.
• The design editor now saves page location when the browser is refreshed.
• Fixed a bug that caused images to be cut off at the bottom on smaller screens.
• Collage pages now skip images from password-protected galleries and hidden galleries.
• Updated HTML editor to fix cursor position problem with newest version of Google Chrome.

We’ve shifted our focus to our control panel, improving, refining, and adding new things we’re sure you’ll enjoy. We’re very happy with the results, the new features, and the foundation it provides for even more new things to come.

As always, here’s a list of the major changes:

Redesigned control panel

We’ve done away with the dated-looking 3d-rendered effects and focused more on refining the overall design and flow of the control panel. We’ve made actions more obvious, used space more wisely, and added lots of new features.

See more of your images at once

Control panel thumbnails have been made smaller and given the ability to span your entire screen. This allows for many more to be shown at once, which is great for managing large catalogs and re-organizing things.

New ability to hide images

Now you can hide/show individual images from a photo gallery without having to erase/re-upload them. This is handy for quickly making changes to your pages without having to delete and re-upload the files.

Custom image gallery thumbnails

Now you can select any image in a gallery to serve as that page’s thumbnail just by clicking a small “star” icon at the bottom left of each image. Even hidden images can be used, which opens the doors to create completely custom thumbnails that aren’t displayed in the gallery at all.

New ability to move images between pages

You can now move images to any page you like, instead of having complete the tedious task of erasing and re-uploading.

New consolidated “Content” section

The old “Pages” and “Links” sections have been combined into a single “Content” section, to make the navigation more reflective of each section’s importance and better reinforce our strategy of separating content from design.

New “Collage” pages

This new page type displays 100 random images from your website, each image linking to its image gallery. It’s a great alternative to the standard home page slideshow.

Automatic custom domain validator

If your custom domain isn’t properly setup, the “settings” page of your control panel will now let you know. It’ll even give personalized advice, telling you exactly what needs to be changed.

Improved payment fraud detection

You can now provide a ZIP code when updating payment information, which helps validate ownership of the card and ensures payments are always properly processed. If you’ve had issues with your bank declining our charges in the past, updating your payment information now should help (even if you use the same card that’s already on file).

HTML support for Dropbox add-on

You can now upload HTML files to your Dropbox folder to publish them to the web, and yes, that includes exported photo galleries from applications like Lightroom. Just export HTML, move to your Dropbox/Apps/22Slides folder, and it’s now published to the web.

Other stuff

• Improved contact form confirmation message
• Created easier way to find images’ URLs from control panel
• Increased Instagram page thumbnail sizes
• Improved responsive image scaling in “popup” photo gallery display
• Improved responsive image scaling in “sideways-scrolling” photo galleries
• Improved responsive image scaling in home page slideshows, especially when images are different dimensions
• Added support for German characters in page URLs
• Fixed bug that caused images to sometimes appear out of order in “tiles” photo galleries
• Changed closed account grace period from one to two months before accounts are erased
• Improved Flickr add-on account recognition to accept url folder names, profile urls, usernames, and contact email addresses
• Removed “trial” banner from trial sites

We never get political, but the ability to own a website that everyone can visit is in danger, and that directly affects us, our clients, and basically every everyone that owns a website or uses the internet in general.

Internet service providers are trying to divide the web into different packages like they already do with cable, only allowing access to the websites you pay for and blocking those you don’t, or those they don’t want you to see.

If you like having an effective website for your small business, please make some phone calls today. It’s the last day to influence your representatives before they vote.

This page has more detail about what’s going on and provides very easy instructions for what you can do:http://www.redditblog.com/2014/05/only-you-can-protect-net-neutrality_13.html

We’ve just made it possible to add Adobe Lightroom galleries to your website! This is great for sending quick galleries to clients for proofing, without having to add them to your primary website.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Make sure you have our Dropbox File Manager add-on enabled (If you don’t, we have instructions here).
2. Export an HTML web gallery from Adobe Lightroom. Please note that it needs to be HTML, as Flash galleries will not work.
3. Place your Lightroom gallery files in your Dropbox/Apps/22Slides folder and give Dropbox a few minutes to sync your files.
4. That’s it! Your gallery will now be accessible to anyone. You can view your gallery by going to YourWebsite.com/files and navigating to the folder you just created (You may have to click “index.html” to view the gallery).

And some things to keep in mind:

• As stated, Flash galleries will not work, though it’s normally best practice to avoid Flash anyway, unless absolutely necessary.
• Lightroom galleries don’t count against your total image limit with 22Slides. You can have as many images as your Dropbox account can hold.
• Other HTML files/websites are also supported, not just Lightroom galleries. Theoretically, you can put any HTML-based website in your Dropbox/Apps/22Slides folder and it will get published online.

22Slides happened to launch on April Fools in 2011 and over the past three years has grown into something well beyond anything we expected. We sincerely thank all of you and hope you’ll continue to allow us to serve you for years to come.

As always, we’ve been hard at work to improve. Here’s what we’ve done recently!

Blog Comments

We released a versatile new add-on which allows users to comment on your blog posts.

New Centered & Right-Aligned Headers

Ever try to center your navigation bar above your content? While possible, it wasn’t always easy, so we added a new “alignment” option to the design editor that allows you to align your logo and navigation to the top, right or left of the page.

Better & Faster Server Architecture

We upgraded our servers to solid state drives, greatly improved database performance, implemented new backups systems, and increased system redundancy to make sure we’re providing the absolute best-performing and most reliable system possible.

Improved Image Compression & Quality

We periodically review our image processing to see if new methods or technologies are available to improve quality. We recently found a few areas we were able to squeeze a little more quality into the images.

Improved ‘Tiles’ Layout

The responsiveness of the “Tiles” layout (the one that looks like Pinterest) has been greatly improved by loading images one at a time, rather than waiting until the entire set loads before displaying anything.

Other Stuff

• Added reminder to front-end website when placeholder is enable, to make sure placeholders aren’t accidentally left on.
• Improved image description layout for sideways-scrolling galleries on full-screen “header” sites.
• Made collections/group pages automatically center for header-wide layouts on different sized screens.
• Improved Retina display support with misc graphics.
• Fixed bug that caused some images to not load all the time on “tiles” gallery layouts.
• Fixed bug that caused page footers to be displayed incorrectly with certain layouts on some mobile devices.
• Changed Tumblr image posts to link to dedicated page, where comments are available, instead of straight to the raw image file.

We just added comment counts for for blog pages, so it’s easy to see than you can comment and how many comments there are, as well as provide an obvious link to get to the comments.

To use blogs, you’ll need to enable the Tumblr add-on (http://help.22slides.com/article/blog), and to get comments, you’ll need to enable the Disqus add-on (http://help.22slides.com/article/blog-comments).

We just introduced a new “alignment” option that allows you to align your logo and/or navigation to the left (default), right, or center.

It may seem like a small update, but it opens up lots of possibilities for new design configurations, like having a centered, full-width website like Harry Glazier’s site, centering your sidebar like Lauren Beck’s site, having your logo on the left side and your navigation on the right, or lots of other things.

It’s already enabled in your design editor for the logo and navigation elements. We’re excited to see what people can do with it!

The “Tiles” layout we introduced a little while ago (based on the layout made famous by Pinterest) has proved to be very popular, but as some of you noticed, it loaded slower than the other layouts.

This was because the page had to wait for every image to load before it could figure out how to fit them together in those unique grids, but we just made it smarter!

Now the “Tiles” layout will display each image as they load, rather than having to wait until everything is loaded. This means your visitors won’t have to wait so long!

We released a new add-on that allows visitors to leave comments on your Tumblr blog posts. Visitors can now leave a comment as a guest (without signing in), or they can sign in using their Facebook, Twitter, or Google accounts.

It uses the awesome service Disqus to do this. So you’ll need to create a free account with them to use the add-on.

Instructions can be found here: http://help.22slides.com/article/blog-comments