Just-A-View - a free javascript slideshow viewer

Just-a-View is a free JavaScript-based album viewer capable of slideshows, permalinks, and other nifty features. Best of all, it’s ultra-lightweight - Just-a-View runs in only 9KB of script and won’t hog your bandwidth precaching pictures that your users will never see. See it in action »

The current version is version 1.0. 

Features

  • Permalinking - jump directly to a specific picture
  • Slideshow mode
  • Lightweight - about 49KB in all, excluding photos
  • Automatically resizes photos to the browser window
  • Bandwidth friendly
  • Cross-browser compatibility
  • Integration with Picasa

Download it!

Want to give it a spin? You have some options. Please don’t direct-link the files below; I’d appreciate it if you referred other people to this page instead, where they can have a look at all the other nifty stuff here.

Picasa template (recommended)

This contains everything needed for Just-a-View to run, all neatly packaged as a Picasa web template. Once you download this, copy the entire justaview directory into * PICASA DIRECTORY *\web\templates\ or where applicable. After you restart Picasa, Just-a-View will show up as a Web Page Template under the “Export as HTML Page” menu.

Version 1.0 »

Basic source

If you don’t have Picasa, then you can grab the source code instead. This is for advanced users only, and will require a lot of painful copy-pasting to get working. However, if you want to create a export template for a non-Picasa photo organizer, such as iPhoto or Porta, feel free to do so! We can get in touch and I’ll link you on this site.

Version 1.0 »

Known Issues/FAQ

I opened up the page in my browser, but it just shows a loading bar!

Just-a-View will only work when it’s running off your webspace. For security reasons, scripts like Just-a-View cannot access local files. Upload the files to your webspace and try again.

Alternately, make sure that you’re loading the proper scripts and XML files - sneak a peak at the HTML source to make sure.

There’s a tooltip floating around, even though I’m not hovering over anything!

Hover over the image or a slideshow control, and the offending tooltip should go away. This will be fixed in a future release.

The caption doesn’t show up in the photo tooltip!

Either you don’t have one, or you used a quotation mark ( ” or ‘ ) in the caption. Just-a-View currently does not support quotation marks in the caption for technical reasons. This will also be fixed in a future release; for now, just make do with what you have. :)

Something else? Questions? Comments?

Get in touch! Contact me here.

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