As we continue to release innovative designs this summer, we're excited to introduce a new photo album that will show up on all of our sites later this month. You'll see a full-length screenshot of one of these photo albums along the right side of this post.

While the existing album wasn't bad and is certainly comparable to what you'd find on other sports websites, we wanted to clean up some deficiencies and get ahead of the curve with exciting new features.

All the same features, done better

We still wanted to keep all of the existing slide show features as well as add lots of other improvements:

1. Thumbnails are larger.
2. The slide show feature is still available.
3. Captions are still available.
4. The album supports different sized photos, so you have the flexibility of rotating your camera and don't have to worry about one oddly cropped photo messing up your photo album layout.
5. Better support for large photo galleries with hundreds of photos.
6. Less space between photos by moving away from the grid layout.

Our customers that have a photo store will continue to see "Buy now" links next to the photos that they've marked for sale.

Vertical scrolling is the new way

The current trend in website design — whether it's Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, or Facebook — designers are pushing a "scroll vertical" concept. We see this because of two reasons:

1. Hardware manufacturers for mice and laptops have made it easy to scroll up and down, either with a mousewheel or an area of the trackpad. This makes it very easy to scroll up and down without having to point and click or learn how it works.
2. Different screen sizes in tablets and smartphones, including portrait and landscape mode, have made it easier to pick a single direction to scroll.

That's the approach we've taken.

Support for fans on all devices

One of the biggest problems with the existing photo gallery is that the slide show album doesn't work well on smaller screens. On smaller laptops, you can't see both the thumbnails and the captions without scrolling back and forth. More importantly, the 30 percent of your fan traffic that is coming from tablets and smartphones are getting significantly short-changed.

We wanted to make this new photo album look good across all devices so everyone can enjoy your great photos.

Please let us know what you think!