Google has made it official and announced the Lightbox view for Blogger. The feature had been live, at least for some users, but possibly for all, for several days now.The official announcement doesn't really add anything we didn't know, except perhaps for the fact that, while enabled by default for all blogs, images that are used as links will not trigger the Lightbox slideshow.
"Introducing Lightbox, the latest in a series of Blogger updates aimed at giving you an improved and modernized blogging experience. Lightbox is a whole new way to interact with photos," Marcos Almeida, Software Engineer at Google,
wrote.
"When clicked, images now expand into a shiny new overlay that displays them at their full size for optimal viewing," she added.
"Once an image is opened in the lightbox view, any other images from the same post will now appear as thumbnails along the bottom," she said. "This feature is automatically enabled for all blogs."
Google boasts that "your images never looked so good," but users have a different point of view. Perhaps most people like the new feature, but quite a few are angry at Google for quietly releasing it and for it messing up their blogs.
Users have taken to the
Help Forums and to the comments section on Softpedia and on other places that posted about the feature. This is not the usual banter though.
When any big service introduces a new feature, many users are up in arms about it, but most of the time, they just need time to get accustomed to it.
This time around, people are complaining about broken blogs, poor performance and even the slideshow not working at all.
Some are saying that it doesn't work for images older than 2009 and, indeed, these fail to load on some occasions. The bugs will probably be fixed, but most bloggers still won't be pleased.
Find us on Google+
