New documentation form image viewer

[Tom Humphrey]

I'm trying out an alternative image viewer for the documentation form and would welcome feedback about any problems.

The new viewer allows for smoother zooming and dragging of the herbarium sheet images and may expose more detail when fully zoomed in.

Part of the motivation for the change is to cope better with some of the huge and high quality images from Kew and the Natural History Museum that we've worked on recently. These were exposing flaws with the old viewer. The new system should also work better on touch screen devices.

I'd really welcome bug reports or feedback about the new image viewer posted to the message board or by email.

Obviously if the viewer doesn't work with particular web browsers then it would be great to know asap., in which case I'll switch back to the old system until the problems are resolved.

More generally, I'd like to know if the new system is an improvement or whether it is too slow to load/use. I've currently dropped the option to unpin images to a separate browser window. Is that a feature that you used, if so then it could be reinstated.

Best wishes and a belated Happy New Year!

Tom

herb@home project co-ordinator

[Tom Humphrey]

Thank you for the feedback so far.

I hope to have addressed some of speed issues by pre-generating image tiles on the server (currently only for the BM sheets, but I plan to do the other collections later), which may cut a few seconds from loading time. I've tweaked the image quality settings slightly, which will also hopefully make things slightly quicker.

There are still some problems with image display - images not appearing or appearing as black sections. I've not yet identified the cause of this - so would welcome more information from those who are experiencing the problem. If you have problems it may be worth trying to reload the page (use ctrl+R to force a page refresh).

[Tom Humphrey]

Further tweaks have been made to prevent the images dragging too far out of the frame, which had made subsequent mouse-wheel zooming v's scrolling of the form window confusing.