Sometime in the recent past, without notice, the Blogger DARKbox (Lightbox) made it's unwanted return. Despite several pleas from users for the expected return of this hideous viewer to be OFF by default, Blogger developers once again decided they know what's best for all our blogs and they turned it to ON by default. Millions of bloggers now have their images being viewed in a manner of someone else's choosing, whether they want it or not.
If you've been hit, again, by the imposition of this major design decision on the way users interact with your blog, you'll have to go into your Settings > Formatting and turn it off.
Lightbox is a dog - a very, very, very slow dog. On one of the blogs I follow, I'm still waiting for a single image to load. It's been minutes and I can still see thumbnails for every other picture being generated.
Many bloggers don't check their own blogs by clicking on pictures to see how they load. These bloggers will now be using Lightbox whether they know it or not. In many cases, in my experience, this will not improve their images or their readers' experience of their blog. In fact, if there are several images in a single blog post, Lightbox will take a long time to render thumbnails of each image, when a reader clicks just one image.
If you have an art or photography blog, or a blog in which images are intended to be viewed in the context of the article's narrative content, then you might want to turn this "feature" off as it is probably breaking your blog and annoying your readers.
Friday, October 14, 2011
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