Blocs 2.5.0 Beta Build 3

I’ll look into the meta data search.

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My point is that you should do all of this before you add these images to a Blocs project. If you had a lot of images in a lot of folders then you probably would have no need to enter these into the Asset Manager. Instead you would probably add a Gallery Bric (not yet but will happen) that referenced a URL for the root folder of all of those images.

IMO images should always be renamed to something SEO meaningful or it is a missed opportunity.

I think we are slightly talking at cross purposes. I agree about renaming files appropriately for SEO purposes. My point is simply that for search purposes within the asset manager the ability to read keyword metadata could be highly useful when dealing with large numbers of images.

Agreed, but my original point was that you should not use the Asset Manager for lots of images where you would have to search for the images with tags or names or GPS or whatever. E.g. If someone puts 2,000 icons and images into the manager and each has many colour and size versions you could easily have 20,000 images in there, which could bog Blocs down during load and edit. It is so much better to select only the images that you want before you add them to the Asset Manager. It is an Asset Manager and not a Mac Media Manager. Images don’t become assets until loaded in, which are specific to each project. The main advantage of the asset Manager is that you can easily see the image whether it is local or hosted. That is a huge feature. I would say that if you can’t quickly see the image you want, then you have added too many images.

A good example of the type of custom Bric that will hopefully become available would be equivalent to the inStacks Gallery which can reference a hosted folder of images, where you just supply the folder URL and the Bric would do the rest. There would be no need to add these images into the Asset Manager.

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I realy like seeing this colourful conversation.

As by now the asset manager is the main port how to bring images into your project.
And using the word project one can imagine it is becoming lituraly a website with a number of pages.

It was a great thing of @norm to allow users celcting the source of each image, either by URL or local, so this would allow the user to store images elsewhere - didn´t work out for me personally in the workflow as I than can´t visually browse the images. Anyhow with this opportunity there is a way to fiddle arround.

A project as in my point of understanding is a big thing, so pre plannig is mandatory.
But as I mentioned - the simple maths for (eg a Shoe comany) a small Shoe collection brings my project easily to a a number of images far above 500 for a simple mens collection of three articles.
EG:
1 shoe in 5 colour variations + 3 diferrent laces combination and a choice of silver or gold buccles…
… and heppp = you are close to 100 variations - equals 100 pics for just one article.

This is the main background why I am dreaming of a smart solution because our main pipeline importing images is THE ASSET manager.

By the way, I very much appriciate the new approaches in 2.5 and having a look what @Norm former mentioned I could agree on having more responsibility of how I name/title my images in order to make them searchable (We all know that discipline is our best friend in orhanizing).

Ok, so far and best regards to all of you
Happy working

We’ll have to wait and see how 2.5 and 3.0 emerge, but we can’t predict at the moment what sort of websites users might want to produce with Blocs and put a theoretical limit on the right number of images.

Up to now, I think it’s mainly been used for small simple sites, but somebody might reasonably want to build a website selling shoelaces or watch straps with hundreds of varieties. One of my (many) criticisms of Rapidweaver is that it quickly becomes impractical on larger websites, due to it’s stultifying performance issues and I’d hate to see Blocs develop unnecessary bottlenecks in workflow efficiency.

At the moment I’m redesigning my old photography site, which is long overdue, but I thought this was a good opportunity to dig deeper with Blocs. I’ve waited because I don’t find any of the current gallery or carousel options very inspiring, but I’m hoping I can come back before long and give it a quick overhaul with something really good as Blocs develops. A while back I looked at some modern photography website designs and some of the best gallery options seemed to be on Wordpress sites.

If you needed 100’s of varieties you would have to organise them into groups. It is no different to creating a book or magazine in that you have to reduce the numbers into manageable groups and sub groups before you go near the web creation process. What you wouldn’t do is to fire up Blocs, drop hundreds of images into the manager and then hope to search on names for what you are trying to do.

Off topic but if you are dealing with lots of photography images then the free tier of Pixieset is very hard to beat with any system.

All of that is fine, but an efficient mechanism for search is still worthwhile. Using the watch strap scenario, lets say I have a hundred folders for different strap types. Yes I could click on the asset manager and manually look for the appropriate folder, but it should be possible to run through a few hundred web sized Jpeg images without any performance drag on a reasonably modern computer. These are not 100mb PSD files and I could almost envisage a sort of smart folder functionality within Blocs.

Speaking of performance, I ran a little test recently where I clicked rapidly between device sizes on Blocs 2.5 in preview mode, while playing a 1080HD video and the result was instant without ever missing a beat as the video continued to play. This was on my ancient 2007 iMac, which makes me very positive about the potential for Blocs to manage larger projects lots of media content in future.

Thanks for the tip of Pixieset, I’ll take a look.

That’s good to hear!

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@Norm I’m seeing a weird behaviour in 2.5b3 when creating a contact form, where text is not visible on the submit button. I removed the original form and tried again, but the problem persisted. I then fired up 2.4.5 and it worked correctly immediately.

I have a strange bug:

When I want to duplicate an existing page using right clic mouse, it’s duplicate the bloc on the selected page instead of duplicate the page

Do you have the same problem ?




I just tried and it worked for me, but I discovered another problem. In two cases the previews do not accurately reflect the hero blocs on the actual pages. The home page preview is missing the image entirely, though a duplicate did show it.

Meanwhile the copyright page still shows the default image instead of the correct one when I visit the actual page. For some strange reason, I am unable to duplicate any page other than the home page and right click doesn’t work at all.

There is also a preview glitch inside 2.5b3 if I have elements hidden at specific device sizes. Basically I end up with a big blank space, but if I preview in a web browser it looks correct. For some strange reason I’m seeing lots of glitches in b3 that were not apparent in the earlier betas, so I’m wondering if I have a bad install for whatever reason. I’m on 10.13.2.

You cant duplicate pages with a right click, only blocs, looks like the right click is detecting the Bloc underneath the page thumb.

To duplicate a page select duplicate from the sidebar page menu then hit the create button.

Blocs doesn’t let you duplicate pages with a right click.

Try saving the project and opening it in 2.4.5 to confirm its defo 2.5 b3.

Just checked in 2.4.5 and it has the same problem with hidden blocs leaving a blank space when previewed inside Blocs. If I go to View > Preview in browser it appears correctly.

The process of having to add hero blocs more than once to account for different devices seems convoluted, which is why I suggested it all be done in one bloc Hero bloc image choices

ok so it looks like the duplicate page function isn’t working correctly in 2.5. I’ll get this fixed ready for build 4.

ok this is all fixed and ready for build 4.

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Certain project keeps crashing on startup - others are fine (all on same iCloud-Folder)…
Also no issues when opening in 2.4.5.

Crash report:

Application Specific Information:
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: '*** -[__NSPlaceholderDictionary initWithObjects:forKeys:count:]: attempt to insert nil object from objects[2]'
abort() called
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException


Help very much appreciated! Running High Sierra (10.13.2) and 2.5.0 beta 3

Do you get the crash with 2.4.5?

Thinks Norm :grinning: