Updates in 2021


Updates in 2021


We have a few exciting updates planned for the very beginning of the new year:

  • All members will automatically upgrade to our Responsive Thumbnails feature, which has been available since December 2019 and is now well-tested and stable. The upgrade itself will not change your thumbnail sizes, watermark or settings, but after the upgrade you'll be able to customise thumbnails sizes and watermarks on a per-collection basis, and you'll be able to create thumbnails larger than 840px if you wish.
  • As part of Responsive Thumbnails, the old Display Mode: Legacy will no longer be available — all collections using that setting will automatically switch to Display Mode: Standard.
  • As part of Responsive Thumbnails, we'll no longer be displaying View File thumbnails at exactly 420 pixel size (it's too large for mobile and too small for large desktops). Accordingly, the dedicated 420px background image at My Websites > Main > Customise Design > Thumbnail Borders will no longer be used (i.e. as sometimes previously used for a Polaroid effect). The 140px background image will continue to be used, if configured — only its larger counterpart will be retired.
  • Flash officially dies at the end of December 2020, and Adobe is pushing a final update to all computers to permanently disable it, and all browsers have pledged to drop support. While we've never used Flash in our core system, we did allow photographers to build some Flash slideshows with SimpleViewer, AutoViewer, monoslideshow, and Flipping Album (see My Websites > Main > Pages > Edit Web Pages if your account is from before ~2012). We've always seamlessly offered an HTML5 JavaScript fallback on these slideshows for visitors without Flash, and will continue to do so, but now might be a good time to review old pages and switch to our more modern slideshow choices.
  • The two "not recommended" checkboxes at My Profile > Preferences will be switched off for all existing users. These have been unticked for new users for a long time, and the extra emails are no longer necessary thanks to our better reporting tools like Tools > Recent Emails and Tools > Marketing > Email Export Tool. The excess unnecessary emails create extra work for you and increase the chances that all our emails will be flagged as spam, so we want to cut down where possible. If you still want to receive these emails, you may re-tick the checkboxes.