Blogspot, Blogger, Lightbox & deaf ears

Pleas to have the new Lightbox Viewer removed or made optional have apparently fallen on deaf ears at Google.

The new javascript-based viewer, which loads all blog article pictures in a single album when a reader clicks just one image, was imposed on all Blogpsot blogs late last week. Revolt was immediate with users flocking to Blogger's help forums, pleading for a way to remove this from their blogs.

Initially, users were told by members of the Blogger Team that they were being listened to and that suggestions and concerns would be put to the team. Anger grew as the situation remained unchanged over the weekend with no announcement that the major complaints, the lack of consultation and the wish for it to be removed or made optional, would be addressed at all.

Dismay grew yesterday as an announcement of this new "feature" appeared on the Blogger Buzz blog making the bold claim that "your images never looked so good". Several people claim to have posted comments to that article (I have posted two comments), but no comments have been published at time of writing this. (Update: comments now appear to have been disabled at Blogger Buzz)

A new thread was posted on the help forums yesterday, announcing the now days-old "feature" and asking what people think of it. Astonished users, who'd been making their thoughts known for more than four days in the same forum, to no avail, quickly repeated their opinions on that thread. Despite a veritable cavalcade of comments essentially saying "get rid of it", "make it optional" and "it doesn't work on old images", there has been no official response to the concerns. It has, to date, been left to users to try and cobble together javascript and HTML hacks that will, sometimes, over-ride the new viewer.

There are many technical problems with Lightbox Viewer, as deployed on Blogspot, that could no doubt be overcome with some tweaking by the developers. For example, the new viewer often does not even load images posted prior to March 2010. Many blogs existed long before that date but old articles on those blogs are now effectively broken. Other problems include conflicts with existing viewer options employed by some bloggers and the inability to view large images at full resolution. I'm sure these things are fixable, if anyone cares to deal with them.

However, my concerns are not with glitches but the fundamental issue of imposing an all-or-nothing album-style viewer on every blog.

The Lightbox Viewer may well make sense for photo albums. People who use a blog to write about their wedding or new baby, and who post a collection of photos of the event, will likely see some benefit in having all the images load in a single thumbnail gallery. Photo-album sites like Flikr and Picasa work this way for very sensible reasons.

But not all blogs are intended as simple photo albums. Indeed, the genesis of blogs, or "web-logs" as they were more formally known, was as journals or diaries. They were, and largely still are, about information and education - they often tell stories. In such blogs, pictures, for the most part, form an intrinsic part of the narrative. Science-based blogs, for example, might include data graphs and charts for the purpose of explaining statistical details to casual readers who may not be trained in the sciences. Such images are intended to be examined in relation to the text that immediately surrounds them - that is, after all, the point of blogging such things, to inform and educate the reader. Having a bunch of graphs and charts load into an album whenever you want to view just one of them, makes no sense and breaks the narrative intent of the article. Millions of such articles have now essentially been vandalised by this change.

Other images might be used merely as decorative graphics that few readers would want to view separately. However, with the Lightbox Viewer, all these images are treated as part of a single photo album and all will be loaded as thumbnails if a reader clicks on just one photo in the same article, in order to take a closer look. This seemingly-harmless quirk makes an otherwise professionally-presented blog look cheap and cheezy. Why do we spend countless hours tweaking our CSS layouts if, at the end of the day, our presentation is hijacked by a significant design decision that we neither sought nor supported.

But wait, there's more.

Depending on your bandwidth, Lightbox Viewer can be remorselessly slow to render every thumbnail and then render the main image which may not be as large as the original uploaded by the blog author.

Interestingly, Blogger Buzz appear to have embedded full resolution, Lightbox-sized images as thumbnails in their salutary article. This means that Lightbox loads them instantly when clicked. But, unless something else has changed, this is not how images are automatically loaded and displayed when using the standard Blogspot interface. If this change has been made universally, then blogs will slow to a crawl as browsers attempt to load potentially dozens of high resolution images as thumbnails on blog pages.

It's possible that Google may be trying to have blogs more closely knitted with the new Google+ social media site. I can't, for the life of me, image why they would attempt to do this when one of the biggest "selling" points of a Blogspot blog is the ability for the author to individualise their blog by messing with HTML and CSS settings. It's one reason why I'm on Blogspot. But that individuality has been usurped by the imposition of a major interface change that makes no sense on my blogs or on most of the blogs I follow. And surely, if someone wants a Google+-styled site, they could just sign up to that service. It makes little sense, to me anyway, to have every website look and feel like every other site.

Blogs are not photo albums. Blogs are not social media sites.

Now, if only someone would listen.