Posting pictures with new interface.
 

I have tried today to post some pictures, but using the "Image" button or the "Inline attachments" button they are both coming out large when previewing post so I haven't posted them. Sometimes you just want to post 4 small pictures in a row.

Some instruction please.

Clarke,

I've moved your question from General Tech Help to Jaguar Forums Feedback & Suggestion Centre forum as it's a forum rather than a vehicle issue.

All images now automatically go to screen width and there no longer appears to be a way to determine the preferred scale. I've asked forum owner Internet Brands for further guidance.

Graham

Change for the sake of change. Unnecessary, IB! There are bound to be many problems associated with the changes. And I am sick and tired of digital text becoming smaller and smaller. This reply text is ridiculously small and lighter than the text in posts. And the lines! What's with all the lines everywhere? Why??

Thanks for the reply Graham, I thought I had put it in the Feedback section. My bad

Richard,

Not exactly change for the sake of change. The way in which users are viewing the forum has changed considerably since the previous design was rolled and the update was necessary to become more tablet-friendly.

The forum should look and feel much as it did with the one notable exception of a redesigned header. This occupies less screen area and allows scaling the forum's layout based on the size of your screen. There are also a few tweaks to the spacing and borders around the site and I'm sure Internet Brands will see your reaction to the new font size and the lines.

Graham

I sure hope they change the color pallet or give us the chance to change the color pallet. Who ever chose a black header over white background with small light colored text for the sub forum home page should be forced to stare at the sun for a while.

Since IBB also isn't affiliated with Jaguar it would be a blessing to have sub forum specific car images posted in the Jaguar forums top header. At least the prior header showed cars with individual styles versus the bland cookie cutter stuff up there now.

Yeah, but what about the lines, the lines?

Ugh - the loss of thumbnail images with them all becoming full size and inline with the content is a real backward step that makes the forum harder to read and longer to load pages.

E.g. If I reply to a post with a dozen images showing workshop steps, etc, they now all show inline which annoys everyone else that reads that thread who doesn't want to download and then scroll past a massive wall of images. Based on experience of managing some large online communities that experience loses visitors fast.

I won't be posting any images with my messages until that is fixed. :(

I also dislike the new 'self scaling' images as I prefer to determine the size and layout of multiple images in a post. There are many situations where successive giant image are inappropriate to the content of a post. However, it is apparently easier and offers a better experience for tablet and phone users.

Graham

The way to do that is with responsive CSS to tailor the display to the device, as with the header, and either run-time or step-sized image sizing on the server depending on the resource cost. It is not particularly hard to do, and lets you build a completely tailored experience for each device size and capabilities. All phones and tablets nowadays will support native image sizing on web pages to let you (the viewer) turn a thumbnail into a screen sized image by double tapping on it. Web sites (and native apps) shouldn't try to change default behaviour of the devices they run on... It rarely works to improve the experience.

From a quick play with emulation the current forum software is using user agent identifiers to customise the content it serves anyway. It is not the preferred way anymore (responsive CSS is the only way to ensure compatibility with every new device) but there is no reason why the software can't provide inline images for mobile users and thumbnails for desktop users if they still want to use the user agent approach.

When responding to questions about obscure electrical features it has been useful to be able to post up maybe a dozen images of connectors, modules, etc, to cross reference back to the text. To do that now would require you to scroll four or five pages up and down constantly to jump back and forth. Now I'll need to paste them all into a Word document and print to a PDF to link to the message, which takes longer for me and makes it harder for viewers to jump to the information they want. Even in Clarke's example above of a corroded panel you don't really need to see it 2000px wide to understand what it is showing (ironically it is actually too big to display in one go on my 30" display so I have to scroll to see the whole image - whereas my phone correctly scales it down.) I fear I'm going to prematurely wear out the scroll wheel on my mouse!

One thing I find quite handy about this new re-write is the Auto-Save feature when composing.
Especially as this forum now crashes my browser about every 5 minutes on a good day. Sometimes the script even crashes Windows! First time that happened it liked to scared me to Death!

But, if my composition has been Auto-Saved it comes right back when I restart my browser, or reboot Windows.
AHA! There it saved again.
How handy is that.

And Looky here at this! I'll get through a whole post without crashing!
What a good start to the day!!

I'm afraid to even try to post pictures anymore.
(';')

Got to love the autosave.

So just my 2 cents. With a disproportionate amount of people (dare I say perhaps even forum members) now using phones & tablets over the antiquated desktop and laptops. I can only speak for myself in noting that when the "thumbnails" were the norm, clicking on them to load full page was not very useful as they were never screen centered (regardless of phone, tablet orientation). Trying to slide the picture to view it rarely worked.

So, yes they are larger, yes maybe longer loading (I've not noticed but will acquiesce), but much better for tablets and phones.

This is absolutely spot on, CSS is the way to go, I am currently finishing a resto on a 1967 Mk2 and post several pictures at a time, my posts now are unwieldy and do not give a good experience for forum users, so I will have to change the way I post or not post at all, as xdave has said, it is often the case where multiple pictures are referred to within the post and the post then becomes virtually unreadable.

I have looked at some of my older posts on my phone, and they are just as user friendly as the new posts, but the new posts don't work on a PC.

I for one am in the slightly older demographic and sight is getting worse with age, the thought of using a phone for browsing is almost impossible ! I can't believe that the average Jaguar Forum user is under 30 with perfect vision, bring back thumbnails for the PC user.