Narrated Website - Browsing media in person page

In the media section of person page you see thumbnails of images associated with the person. Currently if you want to browse through the images associated with the person in large size, you have to click the first thumbnail, which opens a media gallery with that particular image activated. Then to see the next image of that person, you will have to go back to the previous page with the thumbnails, and then click the next image. You would then have to repeat this process over and over, and you will have to keep in mind which image you clicked the last time.

To make it easier to browse through large size images of a person, I suggest there would be a way to click “previous” or “next” to go to the next image, just like you can browse through all the images mixed up in the “root” media gallery.

I’m not sure if @les61 describing possibly the same thing in the bottom most post in this thread have a some kind of solution to this, but I don’t see how they could get the media arranged properly by naming them in case of group photos with multiple references: Media to show on Person page - #5 by DaveSch

Is it possible to include a “personalized” media browser without the need to create lots of new html pages? Maybe even optionally include it in the person page itself? Although I can see that such browser couldn’t maybe include that neat feature showing references overlayed on top of the image. I’m thinking things like How To Create a Lightbox

1 Like

While it might be doable, I don’t think it would be easy, and I would certainly want it to be optional. With over 15,000 media objects in my database, it already takes about 15 hours to generate a narrated web site on my computer, and I suspect it would add considerably to that to do what you are suggesting. Also, because the narrated website only uses static pages, that could potentially add a large number of pages, and my site hosting company limits the number of inodes, and I am already approaching the limit without any optional pages included.

On the other hand, the dynamic website (an optional add-on) already does this.

I continue to use both the narrated website and dynamic website because I’ve found advantages and disadvantages to both, particularly in the way media objects are handled. The dynamic website has the separate galleries associated with individuals while the references section of media pages in the narrated website is much more useful. But I suspect that is also the reason it takes so long to generate a narrated web site, and I doubt that most users of the narrated website really care about the references section.

Allen Crider

Very difficult to do. We need to generate new pages for that person.
And we have so many pages !

It is easy to say but difficult to do. It depends on the browser you use. This is a free project and only free browsers are supported.

But don’t worry, I’ll look at if this is possible
The best should be to create a feature request.

Currently, if you click on a thumbnail, you get an html page with a photo.
If you have multiple people in this photo, you can click on the person you are interested in and see their data
With the lightbox, I’m not sure we can do that.

Thanks for the replies.

I had checked the dynamic web report long ago but I had forgotten it. It indeed seem to support individual galleries like this. I also tested it whether it supports the language I would be generating it and it does support it, but not the same way as narrated website. I can’t choose it from the settings, but I just have to launch gramps in my local language and then generate the report and it will be in this language. Also for my person pages I like them kind of compact, and was actually a bit put off when in the dynamic web report demo the person pages seemed even “longer” than in narrated, but now I discovered this “tabbed” mode which is quite nice. With narrated website I have experimented hiding the “families” and “parents” subsections in css and in some way boost “pedigree” subsection as I find that one nice and compact. I will still a bit later have to test the dynamic web report on mobile and try host it locally to see if the openstreetmap works as expected.

Yeah, all what you are saying about implementing this individual media gallery in narrated website was kind of what I was afraid to hear, not easy and has its possible downsides.

It will be easier in 5.2 with the option “Toggle sections”.

I think this will be possible. relatively complex.
We need to test it with and without images, multiple languages, different css…

Can you create a feature request for that ?

Ok.

Nice to hear that in 5.2 you can toggle sections. That reminded me of a related thing that I have been thinking about. No need to take it seriously if it’s not something that anyone else would be interested but for increased customization it would be nice to be able to re-arrange the sections.

Then one more customization that I was thinking was to be able to show birth and death dates of people just after their names in pedigree section. Again, probably very limited use case so no need to care about this one unless it seems reasonable.

Why I was thinking about those features is that I was thinking ways to make the person page more compact. The pedigree section almost includes the same info as the families and parents sections. So if you can visualize the person page where the families and parents sections are removed and the pedigree section is moved up just below events section, or even above events section. Then the customization to show birth and death dates is added after the person names in the pedigree.

What I want to accomplish with this compactness is that imo it increases readability, and pedigree section is one of the better ways for “people jumping”. You can quickly jump from person to person and you don’t have to stop thinking so much “how should I go to read the page of x next” if you know how they are related to the current person.

This is going a bit too much off topic but I want to mention one other thing. The current narrated website’s person page doesn’t have a working horizontal scrolling on mobile, and some of the information goes out of bound (partly ancestor graph and some text). I tried with all the themes available and I have the problem in all of them. I asked about this from therijn in an e-mail exchange, since that problem is not happening on their website that they have generated with their WebReportRWD plugin. Also I can fix (or add) the narrated website’s horizontal scrolling by copying the narrated-screen.css flie from their website (link can be found from this page) 0010341: Narrated Web Site Report - responsive design - Gramps - Bugtracker – Free Genealogy Software Maybe there is some one css rule that could fix it but still not sure. Extra note that the ancestor graph is too much zoomed in imo especially on mobile browser.

The dynamic web report plugin that I tried yesterday doesn’t have a good fast way for “people jumping” imo, so there is maybe more potential in the original narrated website. There is the “tree” page, but maybe a bit unintuitively you have to right click in the tree view the person to be able to jump to a person page. Also you need extra click to get to the tree etc.

Do you think I should create a separate thread on some of these things I mentioned?

Yes you can.

I tried manualy to create one example which provides this fonctionality.

This page is available only in french.

This page is available in six languages, but only the french one provides this feature.
This page is for a website with the toggle sections.
If you want to test it without this option, remove the “wt” to Gramps52wt.

I am open to any improvements or comments

That could work! The dynamic website approach is a bit better though as there you can see the references on and below the large image. Maybe the narrated website could copy the dynamic approach in some sense. They are using just one media.html file but the gallery is showing only images of given person. Example: Person - Example using template ‘Default’

In media page the URL has media.html?p=person.html&idx=671&mdx=1&simg=%5B1%2C2%5D identifiers for example.

However if changing it to that kind of approach requires too much work, I guess what you demoed on your example is still a good way to browse images of one person. The downside could be that if someone wants to see details (or overlay references) of the image, they have to click the large image, and it may not be as intuitive as in the original where you saw this information right after clicking a thumbnail. What do others think about this?

Impossible to do. All the work would be put in the trash.

The problem is that this section concerns the media. You can have videos, pdfs, kml, …
How to handle such a situation.

Is it possible to modify the page generator so that when it comes across other than image filetypes it won’t add those lightbox related classes or tags to those media items so they won’t be part of the lightbox yet their links/thumbnails would show up in the media section normally, or would that complicate things too much.

Apart from lightbox there are similar tools but with more features, like colorbox or fancybox. They can show videos, html and iframes, but not pdf though so I guess they are not helping.

Also I have still been thinking about the order of sections, and in addition what I said earlier about the possibility to re-arrange sections, I think the media section may be the most interesting section for many people if there happens to be media, especially images.

Looking at your example gramps52wt, it may look a bit boring for a casual guy who is browsing the website. A simple change where the media section would appear right there on top just below the summaryarea and perhaps even by default toggled visible, while all other sections below it would be toggled hidden like they are now would make it feel lively when I visualize it in my head.

So… yet another thought. If you could choose from the generator settings the order of sections and also choose whether they are visible or hidden by default. And then this lightbox feature that you show in the gramps52wt combined, then I think it would allow you to create quite nice person pages to many tastes.

Then in my perfect world there would be couple rows in the end of summaryarea dedicated to birth parents and children for quick “people jumping” access without the need to toggle visible any sections. I think they could be considered to be part of that summary information and be justified to exist there. Perhaps in the page generator settings there could be a toggle for summaryarea: “extended summary - show birth parents and children in summary” or similar. These couple rows wouldn’t of course show any details of parents or children, just names listed one after another on the same row. If you look at geni.com for example, it’s easy to do “people jumping” when the parents and children information is right at the top.

I took it into account

I don’t know.

Don’t forget:

  • We are a few developpers.
  • We work for gramps in our free time.
  • We are not paied for that.
  • We have no time to read/search what could be useful for gramps. We try to find a solution when a user requests functionality.
  • The narrative web is the most complex report because you must know python, html, javascript and css.

Perhaps for you but not for all people.

As i said before this is the most complex report. We already have too many options.
I don’t want to add new ones.

I encourage you to become a new developer in order to fulfill your wishes.
Gramps is Gramps and should not be compared to non free projects.

If you want to test the final version for 5.2 which works in a multiple languages and with or without toggle sections, here is the urls:

Gramps52 : The narrative web without toggle sections.
Gramps52wt : The narrative web with toggle sections.

It should work on mobile.

Forgot to say:

It works for all Media sections.
That means for Persons, Families, Events, Places and Sources

Great work!

The horizontal scrolling (where needed) in Gramps52wt example seems to work better on mobile than in the current version. Those two image thumbnails in the media section overlap a little bit each other on mobile though.

Is it possible for me to generate a website using Gramps52 or Gramps52wt somehow? I am working on a lot of images. There will be maybe even over 1000 on my site. It’s gonna be a test for having a site with living people (my close relatives). I’m currently scanning and organizing a lot of pictures. It will be maybe after one month when I’m about to generate the website.

Yeah I have been thinking of learning how it works and maybe contribute a little. Or maybe I create a script for some minor post-installation modifications, for example to toggle on/off certain sections by default.

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.