Need Feedback on Site

I've been playing around with a simple program called Porta with the possibility of using it to revise my site. One of the problems that I have in maintaining my site is that updating is a good deal of work. This simple little program allows you to make a gallery from any folder of images by right-clicking and setting your options. It seems too simple to be true, so I tried a sample page and I'd appreciate some comments before making any further albums.
The album is here: http://www.norrisdigital.net/insects/
I especially want to know about loading speeds and whether the flash is beneficial or a pain.
Thanks in advance!

Terri

Hi Terri. It works very well, easy to use. I like it.

Terri,

I love that soldier bug and prey! That is one fine shot.

On to the gallery... I tested it with IE and Mozilla, and it worked fine. Load speed was good, but in Mozilla it seemed to load partial thumbnails, then it went back over them and sharpened and brightened them up. I'll give it a look with Safari when I get home and see how it does in my Mac browser.

The flash on mousing over the image was a bit much for me. I prefer the thumbnails (which on my display were on the left). Looks good though!

Wow...awesome portfolio Terri. I think it was pretty easy to use. Load speed for me was good (though I am on a T1 connection).

Nathan

Awesome pics! Has to be the best set of macro insects I've seen. The flash interface worked well. The white background was the only drawback- a little too bright for my eyes.
Thanks for posting the link-

Terri,

Works equally well with Safari on my Mac. Interestingly, I get the two-stage load on the thumbnails on Safari just like I did on Mozilla. It happens very fast on the Mac and I don't find it to be a problem on either system. Looks like a winner!

Thanks for the input....I do believe I'll make albums for my other galleries and post to my site.
Kelly....thanks for checking with different browsers....that's a huge help!

Cool. Looks quite nice, and professional.

Kelly - I think the thumbnails brighten when the full size-image has been completely downloaded as a background process. So you don't need to wait for images to load while clicking through them...

Basil

I like the subtle transition effect. I think this is a great tool for web slide show presentations.

Guy

Terri - that is some amazing insect photography. The gallery is easy to navigate and works quickly for me (fast connection, internet explorer).

Pete D.

cool pictures. I'm on a DSL connection and load time seemed a bit long (from the perspective of being spoiled by DSL. Compared to my old dial up connection it was plenty fast). If I was still on dial up I'd probably have given up.
Once it was loaded, the pictures came up quickly. Some of the best insect work I've ever seen

Thanks again for the feedback.....this is such a simple FREE program that adding images is super fast. You can extract EXIF data as the caption, and that's what I did with this sample album (I used the filename as the minor caption, and could place it anywhere in the image). You can also watermark images and add other captions.

Hi Terri,

Great images! I'm on a dial-up with IE and it took several minutes for all of the thumbnails to load. I guess that's because it's really loading the full-size image before showing the brightened thumbnail. My dail-up connection is probably worse than most (24kbps on average--the phone repairman tells me I'm lucky to even have a phone where I live ) so I may not be representative, but I probably would've given up if I was just surfing.

Lori

Hi Terri!! Wow, that is some kind of impressive!! I've never seen so many well captured insects in one place! You are very good at what you do, for sure. I have dial-up where I live (no other options available) and it didn't seem to take long at all to download. Very nice page set up as well.