HOW THIS WORKS - Instructions for what is hopefully obvious, as well as geeky tech stuff

If after the comment under any full-sized image or "movie" (embedded YouTube video) you see "read more below thumbs", that means I have blabbed on and on and the small comment area wasn't enough for what I had to say about that one. If you are in the slide show mode there will also appear next to that "read more..." a "pause" link to pause the slide show. "start slideshow" at the top resumes the slide show (or starts it from any image or movie you happen to be looking at in non-slide-show mode.

You can start a "slide show" (hands free viewing) from anywhere, but once you start it, a click on any image or link will stop the slide show.
Clicking any Embeded YouTube Video controls will not stop the slide show, however, including their big Replay arrow that appears on some of the videos upon completion. (But not all? Uh, can't tell you why. Sometimes the arrow is there, sometimes not.)

It is absolutely all right to just click through each slide (or back) at your own pace using the bear arrows (bearrows?) above the thumbnails, or just click on the thumbnails you'd like to see the larger image of (or "movie" of...) as you page through the sets of thumbnails via the bottom bear arrows.

For the slide show, however, the interval timing is set to a very relaxed 7 seconds, except for the embedded YouTube videos, and the timing for those assume a pretty good connection so the streaming goes okay, and then there could be several seconds after the video has completed before the slide show moves on to the next image/movie. Slow streaming could cause the slide show to pick up and move on before the end of the video, but you'd likely not be missing much.

If you've clicked Help because the embedded YouTube videos are proving to be a problem, the option for seeing just the stills is via:

Photos Without Embedded YouTube Videos

The show should display as a page with an image above two rows of 8 thumbnails. I've only really checked it out using
Safari 5.1.7 and Firefox 18.0 on a Mac (as well as 3.0.19, and 3.6.13, but the old 3.0.19 did some funky non-centering of the comment under the image - I doubt anybody except people who never use Firefox like me would likely have that old build...).

Google Chrome? Uh, I think Chrome is supposed to simply do everything wonderfully and I'm not sure why I haven't switched to it, but on a Mac version Version 24.0.1312.52 looks to be happy as heck.

On a PC? Well haven't checked yet, but maybe it will be just fine. If you're using an old browser or having problems for any other reason, sorry.

If you are experiencing stuff you don't think I intended, please feel free to let me know. Thanks.

To go back to the photos right where you were, use your "Back" link (unless you opened this Help stuff in a new tab or window), or you can go Back to Photos at the Beginning.

Geeky, Nerdy Stuff:

Not that I'm a stupendous programmer, but real programmers don't write brand new code; they build on the labors of others along the
the lines of "why the heck reinvent the wheel". I had, from scratch, actually, already invented a wheel written in Perl to use a
list of files with parameters to comb through and build a myriad of html files to serve up a manual (via clicking) slide show of
images. In fact, the Hetch Hetchy pictures are from that code.

The php scripting behind what I have here was at first started based on my Perl scripts, but then I found:

PHPSLIDESHOW by Greg Lawler at http://www.zinkwazi.com.
His script comes with this:
-------------------------------------
PHPSlideshow is relesed under the GPL
See the license at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt
Feel free to use/modify this little script
-------------------------------------

So it's open source, and clearly I felt free! The modifications I did to his php script are these:

• Made it so thumbnails moved in groups when appropriate (via my links, or on next picture at end of thumbnails block).
• Added links mentioned above to bring in next or previous sets of thumbnails.
• Added special handling to incorporate embedded YouTube videos.
• Added functionality to stop slide show if anything is clicked. (Using YouTube video controls does not stop slide show.)
• Added functionality to set slide show pause time independently for each YouTube video.
• Added functionality to have a longer, continued comment about any image/video and on the main comment line an automated note that there is more to read (if one likes) below the thumbnails, and if in slide show mode, added a "pause" link next to that note.
• When one image loads, the next image is pre-loaded, so in slide show mode or clicking through the images in order (Next Image bear or just clicking on the next image's thumbnail) the page works just fine. But a randomly clicked image from the thumbnails was causing the entire page to tweak and the thumbnail rows to leap up to the top since the image height hadn't been determined, so I added a set image height (which all the full-sized images are) in the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and a background animated gif to kind of show that something is happening. It's actually kind of obvious what's happening with the image drawing and all, but to be honest I added the animated gif because without it the preset style sheet's black borders for the image shrunk down to the 400 pixel height (now fixed) and appeared as just the vertical black line (no width defined yet since it actually changes depending on the image), and that vertical black line just looked stupid. I decided I still like the end result of the black border (get rid of it and then the entire space just sits gray as the image draws), so went with the animated "downloading" gif, which may look even more stupid, but hey, what ya gonna do? TMI?