22Slides

Your home page now looks better-than-ever on mobile devices, thanks to a few new features we just released this week.

Larger images that fill the screen

One challenge for us has always been to display large full-screen images (usually meant for landscape-oriented desktop monitor display) on small portrait-oriented devices.

The obvious and least-exciting solution was to scale images down to the device’s width, so no prominent part of the image was cropped out. This often created lots of negative space both above and below the image and left the page looking empty.

Now, mobile home pages display images much larger, filling almost the entire screen, while never cropping your subject out of the photo, due to the new focal point feature explained below.

Focal Points

Displaying photos across multiple devices, each with different sizes and wildly-different aspect ratios, creates lots of opportunity for unfavorable cropping.

If you’ve ever uploaded an image with its subject close to the edge of the frame, then resized your browser window, you may have noticed that sometimes the important part of the image can get cut off.

Our new focal point feature fixes this, by allowing you to manually choose your home page images’ focal points, ensuring that when (and only when) your images have to be cropped, it’s done so in a way that preserves their integrity.

Slideshows

Mobile home pages also now respect your slideshow settings and will display your images in large, silky-smooth (hardware-accelerated) slideshows, should you enable that option in your control panel.

Originally, the decision to omit slideshows from mobile sites was due to the limited connection speeds of most mobile devices. Slideshows used to severely slow page loads speeds, hurting the overall experience of that first impression many people with have with your brand.

But, due to both our recent responsive dynamic-resolution image delivery system (which ensures only images that are perfectly-sized to the viewer’s screen and resolution are downloaded), and improvements to modern cell networks, the time-cost of displaying a slideshow is negligible or totally unnoticeable.

While we’re located in California and happily complying with government’s lockdown policies, our business regularly operates remotely and current events shouldn't affect our service.

Many of you are finding this to be a great time to improve your websites, and we want to let you know that we want to do as much as we can to help.

We are temporarily providing complimentary web design services, including help from professional web designers and developers who can help with anything from answering simple questions, to tweaking things here and there for you, to getting your logo looking perfect, to custom-coding an idea you may have in your head.

Think of us as your personal web designers.

We understand things may be difficult at the moment, but we think small businesses and mom-and-pop shops like yours and ours can turn this into an opportunity for all of us to work together and come out of it even better than before.

To take advantage of these services, simply contact us using the chat bubble at the lower-right of your admin area.

Take care and stay safe!
- The 22Slides Team

From your “Settings” page, you can now manually choose an image to be displayed when you share your site to places like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

When we launched nearly nine years ago, we limited the number of images per site to just 200, and have been slowly raising that limit over the years, until we reached the current limit of 1,000.

We're happy to report that many of the changes we've been making behind the scenes are paying off, and starting today, we're able to raise this limit more than we've ever raised it before: from 1,000 to 1,500.

You may have noticed your 22Slides website now works with https. Some time ago, we quietly launched free, automatic, and end-to-end SSL certificate support with the help of Let's Encrypt.

What this means is your website will display a small 'lock' icon in the address bar, and won't show the default 'not secure' message that some browsers started displaying for standard http websites.

Behind the scenes, though, all traffic between your visitors and your website is now end-to-end encrypted for maximum privacy.

Because of the end-to-end nature of our https support, we were a little late to the https-party. We decided to take our time and do it right, rather than taking any shortcuts with intermediate services that provided the appearance of full-security, but didn't provide true end-to-end encryption.

By default, 22Slides sites are accessible via both http and https, but you can force your site to always use https, if you like, from your 'settings' page:

22Slides now uses WebP image format by default, rather than traditional JPEGs. WebP is a next-gen image format that provides higher quality images and smaller file sizes, which means your images will look better than ever while loading even faster than before.

There’s no action necessary, our system automatically converts the images on our end. You can still upload any type of image file you like.

On average, WebP images download around 30% faster than before, while preserving at least the same image quality. In our case, though, we increased our default image quality a bit, while lowering the overall files size.

As of right now, WebP images work with Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Android browsers.

Internet Explorer and Safari have yet to support WebP images, but our system will automatically serve the standard JPEG images until they can handle WebP images.

We've completely overhauled how 22Slides handles images, rewriting everything from the ground up to display your work in the best light possible.

Full Retina Resolution, Everywhere

Your website will now automatically display the perfect resolution image for your viewers' screens. It doesn't matter if they're on a phone, a standard desktop computer, or the latest and greatest high-def cinema display, your site will automatically deliver the sharpest images possible.

To make sure your images are ready, sign into https://22slides.com/signin and visit the “Settings” page in your control panel.

Fully-Responsive Images

Now you don't have to choose between quality and speed. Our images are now fully-responsive and serve only the most-appropriate images to each visitor. Everyone will see images specifically calculated to fit their screen size and resolution, so mobile devices won't be weighed-down by images fit for a 27" display, and maximum image quality can be unleashed on larger screens.

Bigger Thumbnails

Thanks to our new responsive images, you're now able to make your thumbnails as large as you like, opening up tons of new design possibilities.

New Non-Destructive Sharpening

Image sharpening has been refactored to automatically apply to all images on your site, retroactively, so there's no need to re-upload your images if you'd like to change something. More incremental adjustments also allow you to exercise more control over exactly how your images appear.

New Uploader

Faster uploads, no size limits, and the ability to upload from 3rd-party services like Flickr, Instagram, and Dropbox mean there's no longer any need to sweat things like image resolution, dimensions, quality, file size, etc before uploading.

Throw any size files you like at it (the bigger the better), it'll handle everything automatically.

Lots of Little Things

• More design options for “list” layout.
• More design options for “carousel” layout, including ability to hide thumbnails.
• Improved “tiles” layout resizing on window resize.
• Improved look of image descriptions for various gallery layouts.
• Added click and left/right arrow paging to home page slideshows.
• Numerous other refinements and improvements