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Commons:Requests for comment/Changing default gallery mode

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The following discussion is archived. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
At this time, there is no consensus for changing the default gallery mode. There is, however, nothing to stop people from changing the gallery mode on individual pages where they feel that a new mode would be an improvement. Certainly there hasn't been any serious level of objection in cases where precisely that has already happened. Sven Manguard Wha? 17:25, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]


A couple weeks ago, a new parameter was added to the <gallery> tag called mode, that changed how galleries are displayed. See Commons:VP#.3CGallery.3E_tag (perma-link) for the previous announcement. So far, response has been (imho) quite positive, with only one person being strongly opposed to the new gallery mode.

I would like to propose changing the default gallery mode to be packed. (or packed-hover if the community likes that better). This would mean normal <gallery> tags would display as if they were <gallery mode="packed">. Additionally Special:newfiles as well as categories would also display automatically generated galleries in this manner (You can test this using the gallerymode url parameter [1] [2] [3]). For pages where the old gallery is preferable (like COM:QIC), it would still be trigger-able by doing <gallery mode="traditional">

In the interest of honesty, I should note some of the downsides of the new gallery. It tends to look best with photographs, and less good with low resolution images, especially wide low resolution images. Sometimes very narrow images can also cause the caption to be word wrapped so much that it takes a large amount of space.

As a point of comparison, consider the "Space exploration" featured pictures in: Original traditional gallery, packed and packed-hover.

Well we are on this subject, I would also like to mention that there are some other options for galleries that can have their default changed. The default width and height of images in a gallery is currently set to 120px, which is a little small. Setting this to say 180px would result in larger pictures, which some may feel is prettier (Example of different size). The other setting we may want to change is captionLength, which controls for categories and special:newfiles, when to cut off the image file name. Currently what happens is that MediaWiki cuts things off after 25 letters, and then there is some javascript on commons that restores the full file name. This seems odd to me, and I think it would make sense to just make MediaWiki not cut off the file name.

Gallery Choices edit

Last of all, here is the various choices just to remind everyone about what we are talking about:

Current (traditional) edit

packed edit

packed-hover edit

As a note of explanation, the caption appears when hovering over, except if viewing on a touchscreen, in which case the caption is always visible. This mode has been tested with screen readers, and appears to work fine with them.

Discussion edit

I have no objection the packed option is superior to the traditional one. Well, I think we should not use hover option when the description is quite long. I tested hover function here and the file description field covered almost half of the image. (I think the descriptions are not that long.) If we have lengthy description and hover option simultaneously..., it's terrible. – Kwj2772 (msg) 16:50, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

More lengthy description covered the whole image when hovered the mouse over. [4] – Kwj2772 (msg) 16:56, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Even with packed (without 'hover') this is a problem. For long descriptions/filenames or narrow images, the description extends over many lines, and blows up the vertical dimensions of the galleries. --Patrick87 (talk) 17:32, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I like the packed gallery version very much, and I'd support making it the default for e.g. Wikipedia articles, but I'm afraid I can't support it as a default for categories. The problem is, that categories don't need to be nice (for contributors), they need to be functional! And the variable width of the packed and packed-hover versions is detrimental to a clear category overview. The nolines version is ugly in it's current implementation and not functional either (I wrote something about that here).
If you want to polish the look-and-feel for non-contributing users, the only possibility I see is to give logged-in users an option, with which you can determine the default gallery mode (as you can determine the default thumbnail size currently, I don't know if this applies to galleries, too, though). --Patrick87 (talk) 17:28, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'm quite fond of the packed gallery, but the example here is a bit limited in that all the photos are the same aspect ratio. The packed gallery format currently favors landscape-oriented photos -- horizontal panoramas can be huge and beautiful! But portrait-oriented photos are rendered much smaller and are harder to 'read'. This also can lead to long titles/filenames being aggressively wrapped onto multiple lines of text, which vertically "de-packs" the gallery and adds a lot of whitespace.
I'd be inclined to lean towards the packed-hover variant because it doesn't have that expanded whitespace, with the caveat that I think it'd be better in most circumstances to have a popup-on-click than a hover for details. I'd also recommend changing sorting of media files from alphabetical (which is nearly useless when filenames are arbitrary and multilingual, as on Commons) to reverse chronological.
However these are... bigger changes than is proposed here. :) --brion (talk) 17:47, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
packed-hover would be a nightmare. If I'm doing maintenance work on categories I need to see filenames. It's totally unsuitable for doing productive work on Commons. --Patrick87 (talk) 19:12, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

 Oppose It ain’t broke—don’t “fix” it! Useddenim (talk) 21:41, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

  •  Oppose I would say that the default choice, when only <gallery> is used, should stay what it is (i.e. traditional), for the sake of backward compatibility - nobody will want to check on 102,792,983 galleries if the change doesn't look terribly ugly there. But that doesn't mean that the others cannot be used on a case-by-case basis. darkweasel94 14:58, 6 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  •  Oppose As per Darkweasel94 and Useddenim. Enable this as an optional, additional parameter (and maybe have a bot adding it in most galleries in article space here and in the wikipedias?), but never let this be the default (or even the only avilable) view mode in categoriesg. Categorizing is lagging terribly with more and more images being added, most of them so frivolously added (thank you, WMF!), that they lack any additional info at all: Cat-a-lot is a great tool to push uncategorized images into a few basic categories, and is also an unvaluable tool in difusing items into subcats of crowded categories. Cat-a-lot will not work with the packed view, simply put — maybe it theoretically does, but the user will have to click on a thin 4px area and any offset will select the item next door. (This adding to the criticism above and already aired in the village pump: This looks good for selected galleries, but is ugly/messy for unexpected sets, such as categories’ contents.) -- Tuválkin ✉ 06:48, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Cat-a-lot does work with mode=packed, and (at least in my actual experience) it’s not more difficult to use it. Jean-Fred (talk) 10:28, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Where can this be tested? -- Tuválkin ✉ 10:40, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Hum, this is stated in the proposal: « You can test this using the gallerymode url parameter […] link. » Jean-Fred (talk) 13:27, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I missed that. Well, it does offer a place to click for Cat-a-lot, even with packed-hover (test here), but the latter doesn’t keep the selection visible onscreen all the time, only when you hover. That Cat-a-lot is not broken is a good thing, but is still messed up for categories in the ways already mentioned in the Village pump discussion. And that’s still bad enough. -- Tuválkin ✉ 15:41, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think for categories it should be a user choice, and in categories (and only there) I could actually imagine "packed" being the default for unregistered and new users - they probably won't use Cat-a-lot much, and the rest of us will just set it to "traditional". Perhaps Cat-a-lot could also set the mode to traditional when started? darkweasel94 15:51, 7 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Cat-a-lot could also set the mode to traditional when started -- Which would require a proper documentation how to achieve this by the developer. -- Rillke(q?) 14:20, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Darweasel says that s/he «could actually imagine "packed" being the default for unregistered and new users» for categories — but why would even those want to, or profit from, a mode that overemphasizes “landscapes” and makes thinner “portraits” all but invisible? I cannot see a good reason to use the new view modes for anything than preselected galleries. -- Tuválkin ✉ 18:02, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As I see it, portraits are never made so invisible that their presence is hard to see (due to the filename which is always displayed), so there is no real problem with that. I think the current version, due to the many borders and empty space it uses, and because images are forced into a specific pattern rather than floating around flexibly, looks somewhat outdated and not very modern. While it is true that landscape ratio images will be better visible than portrait ratio images, currently neither landscape nor portrait ratio images with very big or small width:height ratios are displayed very big. Portraits still won't be, but landscapes will - and both will be displayed bigger than now because the borders and empty space will go away. However, I don't really have a strong opinion on it. I think it should be user-configurable on categories but what is the default, I don't care too much. darkweasel94 18:38, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think the community needs more time to get familiar with the new modes: Will all the gadgets still work …? How can they be adjusted (e.g. the Long-Names-in-Categories-Gadget)? Is it more likely to miss photos in portrait format? For visitors, it seems to be justified to display the one of the new modes by default. Distinguishing between visitors and IP-contributors is, however impossible. -- Rillke(q?) 14:31, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Do you think IP-contributors would be much of a problem here on Commons? Since you can't upload files anonymously, I'd guess most contributors have an account. --Patrick87 (talk) 14:55, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think “the community” is yet to accept this change. It is fine to let us decide wheather we want finely sliced liver in herbal balm marinade or rosted whole with hot sauce, but we may not like liver at all — so where’s the zero-option vote? I would say that and even for preselected galleries that avoid the obvious aspect ratio and long filename problems, the new eye-candy matches poorly the established layout of both Vector and Monobook, clashing with images rendered with |thumb. And that clashing makes the eye-candy an eye-sore. It should be default nowhere. -- Tuválkin ✉ 18:02, 8 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'd say it's not to be underestimated (20-200 edits a day). -- Rillke(q?) 11:55, 9 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

 Oppose I like and prefer galleries the way they are, however is there a way to make this one of the things a user can switch on and off in his/her preferences? so that all galleries regardless of how they were originally formatted would appear the same way according to how they chose.--KTo288 (talk) 12:06, 28 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I just noticed that some galleries were changed to packed mode (Plants, Flowers, Forest, Spring,... - in this case by Hike395) - as the packed mode doesn't wholly convince me (I don't like how it overemphasises wide images / how little space pictures in upright format get - especially if they have text), I wanted to ask if any decisions regarding gallery modes were made? As I do spend some time trying to create 'nice galleries', I'm a bit unhappy about the change in design and would therefore like to know if the change is following a general decision...
Anna reg (talk) 23:38, 4 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
There's no consensus -- in fact, in my experience with packing thumbnails, I think a global decision for all galleries wouldn't work. For example, galleries with flags look terrible in packed mode. To my eye, galleries with packed thumbnails of natural photos (mountains, landscapes, flowers) look terrific. I think that the old-style galleries have an enormous amount of whitespace and force thumbnails to be small so that casual users cannot appreciate the details of the photos.
I agree that the upright images don't have enough room for text -- I've looked at the source for the gallery code, and I think that there is a relatively simple fix to make that better. I can propose this at Meta, if you like. — hike395 (talk) 06:38, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Please yes - it would be great if you have an idea how to prevent that short texts needs 5 lines or more - as is now the case in Trees and Forest species (not surprisingly, as trees have an upright format ;->)
Anna reg (talk) 08:38, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
For Trees and Forest species, I used {{Langswitch}} to display only one language per caption, and I increased the height of the thumbnails in some sections, to not squash the captions. I think I've gotten rid of the 5-line captions (previously, the max caption size in Forest species was 4 lines). If you see any other problems, don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page at en (I may be taking wikibreaks in December, though). — hike395 (talk) 11:59, 5 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.
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