Following some feedback we’ve made a couple of modifications to the Impact gallery.

The most important one is that the all important alt text for images can now be specified.  This allows you to optimise your galleries for search engine indexing.

Also, the auto starting of the slideshow was broken in the previous release.  This has been fixed, but it’s also been enhanced so that it will start automatically when visiting the main URL, however it’ll be paused if the URL contains a direct reference to an image.  This allows the user to return to a bookmarked image without the page changing unexpectedly.

Finally, for those that don’t like the bookmarkable URLs, this dynamic changing of the URL is now optional.

You can read more about these options in the quick guide.

We’ve just released an update to our inspiring Impact web gallery.

Until now Impact has used Javascript to handle the image transitions (either slides or fades), however the performance can be a little jerky on slower machines, especially if there are a large number of images.

The latest version of Impact makes use of an emerging technology – CSS Animations – to provide hardware accelerated transitions on recent versions of WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari (including the iPhone and iPad).  When a user is using one of these browsers he or she is now treated to silky smooth scrolls and fades.

Other browsers fall back to the previous method, and you can now choose to fall back to an even simpler transition in this case.  We’ll be updating Impact to support other browsers as they implement the required features.