21 Oct 2016, 12:40
I hear what you are saying, and I agree that sometimes it's too much to pre-render a layout with hundreds of images. However, I don't think it's a practical solution to build "virtual pages" based on how many images fit on the screen ... Imagine how this would work on mobile devices and other small screens ... Even on my macbook 13", with browser-UI+menu+logo, I can't always fit that many images on the screen at once. It would create a clumsy scenario where the visitor is clicking through "pages" to find images. Besides, it would be a technical nightmare to integrate based on all X3 layout options ... We would have to calculate how many images fit into the current viewport, for the specific device, for the specific layout ... which in some cases could be just one or two images. "Pages" amount would be relative to screen size, and "page4" on a large desktop might be "page22" on a mobile device ... Further issues for deep-linking and SEO.
Personally, I love vertical scroll, and in my opinion it is generally the most effective navigation method for modern websites on modern devices. Touch devices and trackpads (especially Mac), make it fast and easy to navigate between content with vertical scroll.
Infinite Scroll / Load More
Instead, I think it would be more feasible and practical with a "infinite scroll" mechanism or "load more". Once visitor reaches a certain vertical scroll, the visitor will either get presented with a button "load more", or a new segment of gallery items will automatically get appended (and loaded). This is the method that generally all modern services use: Google, Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr etc.
PS! X3 already lazy-loads images as they come into scroll view. By using the method above however, X3 would not need to pre-render a full layout with a long scroll. Segments of items would appear as visitor scrolls to certain a threshold.