PhotoSwipe

Just put in some nice photo gallery scripts on our oriental arts site inkston.com for example this one on How to Paint GongbiHua (also available in Spanish).  In this and similar articles, you can click on any picture in that or other articles to open a photo slideshow and swipe through the gallery – using a finger on devices that support it, click and drag or left and right keys on the desktop.

Photoswipe was a winner in a recent wide-ranging review of imaging tools by the wooCommerce team and is due to be implemented in the next wooCommerce release in the new year.

It’s a  fairly light implementation with some nice features, for example:

• link directly to items in the slideshow: https://www.inkston.com/stories/gong-bi-hua-lotus/#&gid=psgalmain&pid=2
• share individual images directly from within the slideshow
• the lazy loading of larger images is particularly good

We can do a comparison between Photoswipe and Robogallery with some larger slideshows:

• Wang Hui Paintings is an image gallery using Photoswipe lightbox/zoom and responsive masonry layout

• Zhao Mengfu paintings uses RoboGallery  for the same effect: the mouseover effects are nice and it’s great at minimizing initial load and trying to load just what you need. However the just-in-time loading doesn’t work so well on slow connections and you more often get pauses waiting for something to be displayed.  Also Robogallery heavily tied into wordpress, while at the same time not correctly integrated with wordpress native image management functionality.

From where I am currently in China, where the connection to the global internet is 4-10+ times slower than USA/Europe, Robogallery loads first thanks to its minimal initial load, but is then jittery for browsing, Photoswipe takes a little longer to initial page load (especially for a large gallery) but then gives great performance.