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As people dealing with images, we have always wanted to illustrate the posts of río Wang with plenty of images. However, it was not easy to figure out how we could do this the best. Our old readers may recall how the initial modest number of two or three illustrations slowly increased into galleries of forty or fifty pictures. These, however, slowed down the display and made difficult the overview of the post.

We have gradually developed that characteristic solution of río Wang, where dozens of images were composed into one mosaic, and the pictures appeared in pop-up windows when moving the mouse over the mosaic tiles. There are many reasons why we have loved this solution. We could illustrate the post with a large number of pictures – the record holder, I think, was the Jewish cemetery of Lesko with its nearly three hundred photos – without significantly slowing the download. The images held together in one mosaic did not push apart the paragraphs to a great extent, making it more pleasant to follow along. You could browse at your discretion among the images, and discover the connections. But we loved it most because in the mosaic tiles we could emphasize such meaningful details, which were often overshadowed in the original images. Thus we could create interesting connections between the expectations formed on the basis of the details and the full image displayed in the pop-up window, which have also affected the interpretation of the images. And last but not least, the richness and context of the mosaic composition often made excusable even the weaker images.

It was due to the technical problems of the pop-up windows – occasional flickering, poor positioning – and to the requests of our readers that we began to experiment with new solutions. This was doubly the merit of Lloyd who, first as a linguist reads also the commentaries of the Hungarian version of the blog, and thus found Gábor’s request to convert the mosaic into a scrollable gallery, and second as an informatician undertook to realize it. And also the merit of our readers, who with their commentaries helped the development of the final version.

From now on, if you move the mouse over the mosaic, the usual small images are displayed in pop-up windows, and if you click on it, you can scroll through a gallery of large images. This version retains the advantages of the previous solution, but corrects its technical problems. At the same time it enables you to view the images enlarged to full screen when leafing through the gallery. In this case, the pictures download a bit slowly, the reason for which is that we always upload them in their original size (at least our own photos), so that everyone can freely use them according to the Creative Commons (BY-NC) rules. A serious drawback of this solution is that in this large size the imperfections of our photos are more conspicuous as well. On this problem we are still working :)