Images captured by today’s cameras typically have far more detail than most people need.
Sure, if you’re a professional photographer, perhaps one who captures landscapes or fashion, maximum detail may be paramount. But otherwise, a lot of the detail that modern cameras and smartphones end up recording is often lost when images are published online.
This is compounded by the fact that many photographers deliberately choose to downsample their images in order to prevent image theft, which reduces the impact the image will have on the viewer.
So what’s the alternative? SmartFrame’s Full-screen viewing mode, part of our enhanced presentation options, which presents images in the best possible light while maintaining protection over image downloads, screenshots and right-click saving.
Why should I use Full-screen viewing?
Images uploaded to a website or social media platform will have a certain resolution, which may or may not be what you see when you first view them. An image may, for example, measure 2000 pixels across, but the website on which it’s viewed will only show it at, say 600 pixels across, or even less if you are viewing the image on a mobile device.
There may be the option to view it its full size, such as by opening it in a new tab or window. Or perhaps there is a full-screen viewing option; full-screen viewing is not unique to SmartFrame, after all. But the way in which SmartFrame displays the image and takes the user’s display into consideration gives the person viewing the image a handful of advantages over traditional methods.
Want to see how Full-screen viewing works? Just click the icon in the top-right-hand corner of this image.
One of these is page load times. As a general rule, if you embed a high-resolution image on your site to facilitate full-screen viewing, you stand to affect the speed at which it loads. And this is one thing that could negatively affect how a search engine views your page, and thus, where it ranks.
A slow-loading page also compromises the user experience, which makes it more likely that people will navigate away from your site. That can be disappointing if you’re a photographer who just wants to show off their work, but it’s even worse if you’re a business owner whose livelihood depends on online sales.
As SmartFrame doesn’t work on the principle of embedding images in websites, but streaming them to match the requirements of the user’s display and viewing preferences on demand, you don’t need to worry about large images weighing down your site.
Another benefit is that, as the user’s display is being taken into account when they are viewing the SmartFrame, the resolution of the image can be optimized for that particular display. Full-screen viewing allows you to exhibit your images in a way that’s best for a variety of users, regardless of the display being used. Providing the image is sufficiently detailed to begin with, it can be streamed to those using standard and HiDPI/Retina displays at the size that fits the user’s display the best.
And, whereas normally you’ll have a high-resolution image downsampled to match the resolution of your display, SmartFrame only sends the information that’s required to begin with, which makes it much more efficient.
How do I enable Full-screen viewing?
Full-screen viewing is enabled as standard with the Presentation Theme, so if you’ve chosen this as your default Theme it should already be turned on.
If you’re using the Blank or Security Themes, and you’d like to enable it for these, just click on Themes in the Admin Panel and hover over the title of the Theme you would like to customize. Click on the pencil that appears next to the title of the Theme and find the Full Screen option in the left-hand-side menu. Now just click on the slider next to Enable Full Screen and it will turn blue to indicate that this is active.
If you choose to create your own Theme from scratch, you can enable Full-screen viewing in the same way. Just select the Full Screen option from the left-hand-side menu and enable it as above.
Can I use Full-screen viewing with SmartFrame’s other presentation options?
Absolutely. You can use Full-screen viewing with Hyper Zoom, image captions and call-to-action buttons, in whichever combination you like. SmartFrame’s image-protection features, such as screenshot and drag-and-drop protection, also continue to work without any issues here.
Using Full-screen viewing with Hyper Zoom is particularly popular among our users – just click on the Full-screen button in the top-right-hand corner of this image before clicking into the image to see how the combination works.
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