No way to edit photos

[tmcw]

As far as I can see, there's no way to edit photos from their photo page. If I go to the 'manage page', there's a lightbox droppy-down effect if you're lucky enough to hover over a photo and see the edit link and guess it's an edit link, but nothing from photo pages.

That said, there's also no way to get to a photo page from the manage page, looking at that photo.

In general, this area of the site could use explicit text that says what buttons will do, less mystery-meat hover interaction, and to kill all lightboxes, which have no clear advantage over pages, and reduce the number of URLs which can be exposed.

[jmathai]

This one's a bit complicated since we support theming. Originally the edit features were more baked into the theme but then it quickly became difficult since the logic was duplicated across themes. In theory, that could somehow be intelligently designed but given the frontend resources we have it's going to have to be postponed. It's also why there's no edit link directly on the photo page. But we can actually fix this by making the "lightboxed" template a full page (easy enough to do) and link there from the general photo view page ---- and I guess from there the manage page could link there too if that's what works better for users.

The goal of the lightbox (unproven if it's effective) is that it decreases the number of "hops" for the user. At least perceived since when you save you're immediately returned to the grid page. If editing multiple photos the page reloads could get taxing. But again, none of this is proven and this is the first UI and we'll have to see how users like/dislike it and make adjustments accordingly.

Given the mysterious nature of the UI, couldn't agree more. Having edit buttons explicitly labeled for the photo is something we'll try out. But on the other hand if there's a good "explanation" the current UI is simpler (on the eyes) and might be just as effective with less clutter. So the options are more visible buttons or better helper text on the page.

[tmcw]

The goal of the lightbox (unproven if it's effective) is that it decreases the number of "hops" for the user.

Flickr-style edit-in place is probably a better idea if you're aiming for that goal; otherwise the lightbox will eventually grow to be a duplicate of all the data on a photo page, except everything's a form.

It really seems like the ability to have themes isn't solidly justified and injures far more important functionality.

[jmathai]

It really seems like the ability to have themes isn't solidly justified and injures far more important functionality.

Yup. I feel you.

[jmathai]

So I wanted to comment regarding the theming. Often times I forget about the original intent of a decision and in my thinking I remembered why theming was highly prioritized.

We've got some ideas (and associated resources, I guess) on how the photo viewing and social experiences should be. And while we maybe great or good enough for a good majority there's a lot of innovation to be had around making a better presentation layer.

I hope the presentation layer we release isn't always the most interesting or even the best. If others are making unique and better presentation layers for OpenPhoto then everyone wins. And we win because we can merge that back in full or in part.

That being said, management is mundane. We need to have a good management interface. Something like Organizr. I don't see the innovation there being nearly as impactful --- so we can have a standard UI for it.

But freeing theme designers and front end engineers from having to worry about management interfaces means that they have more time and energy into making the viewing and sharing experience better.

I hope that makes sense. It's why we're still rolling themes and each one of our themes is better than the previous. Once we have a standard management interface even we'll be able to iterate our UI faster as a result including rolling out an entirely experimental one for testing and feedback.

I don't want OpenPhoto to end up like Flickr and have the same UI for 5 years.

[jmathai]

Added an edit link if you view the photo detail page. The edit link does not show up if you're in the modal by having clicked on the photo from the gallery. You can simply hit refresh while viewing the modal version of the detail page to get the edit link.