New Image Viewer

tyams

As I searched the community for "new image viewer" just now, I was glad to be reminded of one of the upsides to the new image viewer (being able to edit/correct basically any items that are indexed incorrectly). Are there more that I should know about? Thus far, I've mainly taken note of the negatives (particularly as it relates to US Census Records):

1. images load more slowly and fail to load more often
2. location hierarchy of the image gets obscured -- as in "United States Census 1930-> California-> Alameda-> Oakland-> ED 18-> Image 35 of 38" becomes just "California Census Records 1930 -> Image 136 of 1,142"
3. while viewing the indexed details for an entry, there's no way to estimate the position of the entry on the actual image by judging it's vertical position in relation to the other indexed entries on the scroll bar as was possible with the old viewer
4. while viewing an image, detailed indexed data from all the members of a household can no longer be viewed at the same (or have I just not figured out how?)

Hopefully, solutions can be found to address some of these.

EricPeterson91

I totally agree with the problems mentioned above, and have been particularly disappointed in the scrolling and zooming in the new viewer. I'm including my comments below, hopefully in enough detail so the developers can reproduce the issues and make improvements.

The new image viewer of US census images is much worse than the old viewer, primarily when scrolling and zooming.

1. The old viewer scrolled and zoomed quickly and was very smooth and intuitive, it was wonderful! The new viewer is very slow to scroll around and zoom, and is often blurry and takes seconds to become clear.
2. In the new viewer, when I am zoomed in and scrolling quickly by a large amount by swiping my finger across the touch screen on my laptop, the view moves/updates slowly and by larger increments (not smooth), and often reverses direction at the end of the swipe even if there is more document to view in the desired direction. (Why reverse at all?) This problem did not exist in the old viewer.  Although the new viewer does not reverse if I scroll very slowly. The old viewer has some "inertia" when scrolling quickly and continues to move in the desired direction for a short time after I release my finger from the touch screen, this was very nice!
3. When scrolling around using the new viewer, very often an area of the document is blurry and takes several seconds to become clear.  It behaves as if only a small part of the census image data is cached/downloaded on my computer and portions of it need to reload often when I scroll around even if they were clear a few moments ago. Why not just download the whole image to make scrolling smoother? Or retain all the image data that has previously been downloaded?  The old viewer did not have this problem and the document remained mostly clear once an area was viewed.

Please fix the scroll and zoom behavior to match the old viewer which was perfectly done!

@lyleblunttoronto1 has been a contact in other issues for bug reports, so I'm mentioning them here.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

I agree that the new viewer is not an improvement.

The good news is that you can go back to the old viewer by simply deleting the question mark and everything after it from the URL.

YColeman

Thank you Julia for:

"The good news is that you can go back to the old viewer by simply deleting the question mark and everything after it from the URL."

Thank you, thank you!