A few years ago I purchased the Iceland theme by Jochen Abitz, to create an online gallery of oil paintings for a local artist. Like the artist when she saw Iceland, I was captivated by the smooth ‘rising curtain’-like effect when scrolling down through images in the Iceland theme. Jochen created this effect through the use of the Sections Pro/Section Background (Legacy) stack from Big White Duck (BWD). I’ve made good use of Iceland; everyone who sees the ‘rising curtain’ effect when scrolling through images loves it.
A site I’m rebuilding is centred mostly on images; currently it is overloaded with oversized image files, with page-load times long enough to have lunch while waiting for it to load. The rebuild involves using the delightful Retrobatch application and Srcerer stack, which take the headache out of resizing images for the multitude of mobile devices out there. I still plan to use Iceland in the new site, but must abandon its ‘rising-curtain’ feature because Srcerer is incompatible with the Sections Pro stacks used in Iceland. I did not easily arrive at the decision to give up on Iceland’s unique way of scrolling through images, but what use is a site with good content if no one has the patience to wait for it to download?
Thus, I’m looking for a stack that provides a ‘rising-curtain’ effect by scrolling down, wherein an image gradually reveals the next (or previous) image at its bottom (or top) edge. The image below crudely demonstrates the effect as if one were scrolling down, starting at the top with one image, then gradually changing–while remaining fixed in place–into a different image at the bottom.
I have been searching the web for days to find an image slider that can be controlled on scroll in stead of control by click. If you animate the images bottom to top you could reproduce this curtain effect. Sadly, I did not find one slider that offers this option. If you find a solution, please share. I’m interested.
Setting up Srcerer as you suggested was straightforward; (thanks for the screenshot!).
However, going through all the Sections Pro settings, I was not able to find a ‘height’ setting that let Srcerer control the height (and achieve the goal).
Jochen’s theme is the only known way to scroll through images with the ‘curtain’ effect. He accomplished that by using Sections Pro, with the embedded Section Background stack providing the image. That version of Sections Pro is now obsolete, and the new version of Section Background does not provide the “Fixed Image” option that allows one image to appear to slide vertically up/down over another. All this is moot, because as Andrew, the developer of Sections Pro wrote elsewhere in this forum a few years ago,
Background images are classified as “decorative” and as such do not have HTML markup, nor do they have alt tags, nor can they have a link attached directly as they are only CSS, they do not exist in the HTML markup of the page.
The choice is whether to take an SEO hit in exchange for a captivating scrolling effect by using an unsupported stack.
I’d rather preserve SEO, and thus ask some clever developer to create a stack that enables scrolling vertically through images with the ‘rising-curtain’ effect I’ve described. If I find a solution, I will let you know.
