22Slides Blog

Keep up with the latest from 22Slides, including software updates, improvements, and client interviews.

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Beta Testing is Open 👀

We've got something big in the works. If you'd like to help out by joining our beta testing team, shoot us a message!

Otherwise, you can check out some sneak peaks on our Twitter page.

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Changelog

Home Page: Added ability to define images' focal point, to control how images are aligned & cropped on different device screens.

Mobile: Made images much larger on default mobile home pages.

Mobile: Added slideshow support to mobile home pages.

Mobile: Made social network link add-on apply to mobile sites.

Privacy: Added new service vendors to privacy policy disclosure

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New mobile home pages & better control of image cropping

Your home page now looks better-than-ever on mobile devices, thanks to a few new features we just released this week.

Larger images that fill the screen

One challenge for us has always been to display large full-screen images (usually meant for landscape-oriented desktop monitor display) on small portrait-oriented devices.

The obvious and least-exciting solution was to scale images down to the device's width, so no prominent part of the image was cropped out. This often created lots of negative space both above and below the image and left the page looking empty.

Now, mobile home pages display images much larger, filling almost the entire screen, while never cropping your subject out of the photo, due to the new focal point feature explained below.

Focal points

Displaying photos across multiple devices, each with different sizes and wildly-different aspect ratios, creates lots of opportunity for unfavorable cropping.

If you've ever uploaded an image with its subject close to the edge of the frame, then resized your browser window, you may have noticed that sometimes the important part of the image can get cut off.

Our new focal point feature fixes this, by allowing you to manually choose your home page images' focal points, ensuring that when (and only when) your images have to be cropped, it's done so in a way that preserves their integrity.

For more info about this, visit our help article.

Slideshows

Mobile home pages also now respect your slideshow settings and will display your images in large, silky-smooth (hardware-accelerated) slideshows, should you enable that option in your control panel.

Originally, the decision to omit slideshows from mobile sites was due to the limited connection speeds of most mobile devices. Slideshows used to severely slow page loads speeds, hurting the overall experience of that first impression many people with have with your brand.

But, due to both our recent responsive dynamic-resolution image delivery system (which ensures only images that are perfectly-sized to the viewer's screen and resolution are downloaded), and improvements to modern cell networks, the time-cost of displaying a slideshow is negligible or totally unnoticeable.

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Changelog

Storage: Introduced file versioning for uploaded images, to further backup redundancy.

Redirects: Added ability to create redirects that point to the default home page (thanks, Monika!)

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Helping during the Pandemic

While we're located in California and happily complying with government's lockdown policies, our business regularly operates remotely and current events shouldn't affect our service.

Many of you are finding this to be a great time to improve your websites, and we want to let you know that we want to do as much as we can to help.

We are temporarily providing complimentary web design services, including help from professional web designers and developers who can help with anything from answering simple questions, to tweaking things here and there for you, to getting your logo looking perfect, to custom-coding an idea you may have in your head.

Think of us as your personal web designers.

We understand things may be difficult at the moment, but we think small businesses and mom-and-pop shops like yours and ours can turn this into an opportunity for all of us to work together and come out of it even better than before.

To take advantage of these services, simply contact us using the chat bubble at the lower-right of your admin area.

Take care and stay safe! - The 22Slides Team

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Changelog

HTTPS: Fixed issue that caused certificates to not be issues for some types of subdomains

Galleries: Added ability to exclude pages from random gallery collage pages

Galleries: Added choice for different thumbnail click behaviors on random collage pages

Galleries: Added option to define how many images to show on random collage pages

Add-Ons: Fixed issue with Dropbox API that prevented image thumbnails from being shown

Redirects: Made page redirects work in Dropbox file manager add-on

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Link Preview Images

From your "Settings" page, you can now manually choose an image to be displayed when you share your site to places like Twitter, Facebook, etc.

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🎉 50% More Image Storage

When we launched nearly nine years ago, we limited the number of images per site to just 200, and have been slowly raising that limit over the years, until we reached the current limit of 1,000.

We're happy to report that many of the changes we've been making behind the scenes are paying off, and starting today, we're able to raise this limit more than we've ever raised it before: from 1,000 to 1,500.

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🔒 Free, Automatic, and End-to-End HTTPS Encryption

You may have noticed your 22Slides website now works with https. Some time ago, we quietly launched free, automatic, and end-to-end SSL certificate support with the help of Let's Encrypt.

What this means is your website will display a small 'lock' icon in the address bar, and won't show the default 'not secure' message that some browsers started displaying for standard http websites.

Behind the scenes, though, all traffic between your visitors and your website is now end-to-end encrypted for maximum privacy.

Because of the end-to-end nature of our https support, we were a little late to the https-party. We decided to take our time and do it right, rather than taking any shortcuts with intermediate services that provided the appearance of full-security, but didn't provide true end-to-end encryption.

By default, 22Slides sites are accessible via both http and https, but you can force your site to always use https, if you like, from your 'settings' page:

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Next-gen image formatting

22Slides now uses WebP image format by default, rather than traditional JPEGs. WebP is a next-gen image format that provides higher quality images and smaller file sizes, which means your images will look better than ever while loading even faster than before.

There's no action necessary, our system automatically converts the images on our end. You can still upload any type of image file you like.

On average, WebP images download around 30% faster than before, while preserving at least the same image quality. In our case, though, we increased our default image quality a bit, while lowering the overall files size.

As of right now, WebP images work with Microsoft Edge, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Android browsers.

Internet Explorer and Safari have yet to support WebP images, but our system will automatically serve the standard JPEG images until they can handle WebP images.

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Our Biggest Update Yet

We've completely overhauled how 22Slides handles images, rewriting everything from the ground up to display your work in the best light possible.

Full Retina Resolution, Everywhere

Your website will now automatically display the perfect resolution image for your viewers' screens. It doesn't matter if they're on a phone, a standard desktop computer, or the latest and greatest high-def cinema display, your site will automatically deliver the sharpest images possible.

To make sure your images are ready, sign into https://22slides.com/signin and visit the "Settings" page in your control panel.

Fully-Responsive Images

Now you don't have to choose between quality and speed. Our images are now fully-responsive and serve only the most-appropriate images to each visitor. Everyone will see images specifically calculated to fit their screen size and resolution, so mobile devices won't be weighed-down by images fit for a 27" display, and maximum image quality can be unleashed on larger screens.

Bigger Thumbnails

Thanks to our new responsive images, you're now able to make your thumbnails as large as you like, opening up tons of new design possibilities.

New Non-Destructive Sharpening

Image sharpening has been refactored to automatically apply to all images on your site, retroactively, so there's no need to re-upload your images if you'd like to change something. More incremental adjustments also allow you to exercise more control over exactly how your images appear.

New Uploader

Faster uploads, no size limits, and the ability to upload from 3rd-party services like Flickr, Instagram, and Dropbox mean there's no longer any need to sweat things like image resolution, dimensions, quality, file size, etc before uploading.

Throw any size files you like at it (the bigger the better), it'll handle everything automatically.

Lots of Little Things

More design options for "list" layout.

More design options for "carousel" layout, including ability to hide thumbnails.

Improved "tiles" layout resizing on window resize.

Improved look of image descriptions for various gallery layouts.

Added click and left/right arrow paging to home page slideshows.

Numerous other refinements and improvements

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EU-Compliant Annual Billing Receipts

Tax laws in the EU are a bit more strict than in the US and require specific details to be on invoices. You can now set these details from your account > billing history page and download a single PDF for your annual tax records, rather than chasing down each invoice for every month.

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Narrate image galleries with text

We've added the ability to place text into image galleries, which is great for creating introductions, providing project details, adding pull quotes, or even creating image-centric blogs or story pages. More Info

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New page-specific custom code support

We just added support for logic that allows you to apply custom code to specific pages on your website, making it possible to add specific meta tags, widgets, etc to individual pages. More info can be found in our help section: http://help.22slides.com/article/logic

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Control Panel Design Updates

We've just released a few very important UI updates to our control panels, which streamline the design, make functionality easier to find (namely deleting a page), and lay the groundwork for bigger changes down the road.

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Larger/higher-res Tumblr blog images

We've increased the size of images in "text" posts on Tumblr blogs, which means larger and better-looking imagery, especially on retina or high-resolution screens.

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New "back to top" button on mobile sites

Longer image galleries will automatically display a "back to top" button to allow users to quickly get back to the top of the page and continue navigating your site.