Automatically reformat any annoying/badly laid out image gallery on the web
Alec Jacobson
March 13, 2011
Often I come across very annoying javascript image galleries on the web. Like this one, where when you click on a thumbnail a full size image slowly unveils somewhere down the page. You actually have to scroll down to get to it.
So I'm presenting an automatic re-gallery-izing web application.
Turn this ...
into this...
There are many other examples. Facebook's was pretty bad for a while, though I think it's a little better now. Jezebel and the other Gawker sites have a notoriously bad image gallery. But for me, the most common is artists' pages. Artists' image galleries are rarely easy to flip through and that's usually exactly what I want to do: quickly see a lot of images and occasionally make one bigger and look at it in detail.
I've tried to do this with my own galleries. So you can tell me if I've got a big stick in my eye.
In any case here's a proof of concept to hopefully relieve some of this. Just enter the URL of the gallery index page (it needs to be a page that links to all of the images in the gallery, so this won't work with flash galleries), and I automatically generate a page that simply lists the images so you can quickly view all of them and click on the ones you want to see full size.
Right now the regallery is more or less a raw dump of the images into an html page. There's no reason it couldn't be spiced up a little bit, but that's where all the trouble began in the first place.