Help With Photo Widgets - Square Photos

Hello all! This is my first post in the forum.

I am trying to find a way to use square (same pixel height and width) photos in a widget. For example: I am using the 'Landscape thumbnail gallery' widget - keyword here being 'landscape'. There is, of course, a corresponding 'Portrait' version of this widget. My client would like this same functionality, but with square photos. All of the widgets in Xara Web Designer 9 Premium seem to be specifically sized to be either portrait or landscape. When I resize the photos in my landscape widget from (W: 500px - H: 375px) to make the height 500px to match the width, the width is automatically resized to keep the photo in landscape format. I do not have to use this particular widget, but all widgets seem to share this same concept.

Are there any widgets that will allow me to use square photos?

Any help on this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Kyle

Welcome to TalkGraphics Kyle

What you can do is create new bitmaps that are rectangular and the same color as the page background with the image portion square.

The rectangle will appear invisible over the page background and the effect will be a square slide show.

Alternatively, you can use something like Visual Slideshow www.visualslideshow.com and create a custom slideshow then use a placeholder to add the slideshow to your page.

Hi there,

Apologies for jumping on to this thread, but I have a similar issue to the OP and have tried the same solution that gwpriester suggested. This does work, but the problem I find is that with some of the widgets when you hovver the cursor over the slideshow window it turns into a clickable link cursor. This is fine when the whole of the window contains the image, but when only part of the window contains the entire image/photograph and the rest of the window is essentially transparent, it looks a bit odd on the finished webpage because it means the cursor changes when the user moves it close to, but not actually over the image (i.e. unwittingly hovvering the cursor over the transparent part of the slideshow)

Is there any way to prevent this from happening?

Not that I know of. But most people are not going to hover over an empty space, are they?

Welcome Kyle,

Your best bet is to use Pop-Up layers. Not got time to expand much further at present but here's a quick rough & ready example. Open the attached xar file & preview it to see the results. I'm not a lover of transitions but they appear to work in this instance.