FooGallery has just been updated to v1.2.18. It comes with two big features, one for end users and one for developers. Look for this version in your updates list or on the .org repo. This post will cover the new retina support. Look for the developer feature post coming in a few days.

What Is Retina Display and Why Do We Support It?

If you’re not familiar with what “retina display” really means when it comes to images viewed on your website, allow me to explain briefly.

Retina Display is a marketing term developed by Apple to refer to devices and monitors that have a resolution and pixel density so high – roughly 300 or more pixels per inch – that a person is unable to discern the individual pixels at a normal viewing distance.

Source: Webopedia

In other words, if your users are viewing your WordPress galleries on “retina display” devices your images might not be as sharp looking as you’d like them to be.

Supporting Retina in FooGallery

We’ve given you the ability to do two things:

  1. Create the image files required by High-DPI devices inside each of your galleries.
  2. Automatically detect and show these images to “retina enabled” devices.

Let’s Look at an Example

The spider web and snowflake images on the left are non-retina enabled. Use the slider over those to see the retina enabled versions of those.

The diagram and cactus images on the right are retina enabled. Use the slider to see the non-retina versions of those.

You can clearly see the difference in image quality due to the pixel densities.

[twenty20 img1=”141804″ img2=”141805″ width=”600px” offset=”0.4″]

How to Create Retina Images in Your Foo Galleries

When creating or editing a new gallery, you will see a new metabox named Retina Support. Simply choose one or more of the retina display sizes you’d like created and save or update your gallery.

retina creation metabox in FooGallery plugin
The retina support metabox in FooGallery

As you can see in that screenshot, each new size you choose will create additional thumbnail images. Depending on the number retina images you have on your site, you will be using more storage space on your web host.

What Else is New?

The other major new feature included in FooGallery is additional data sources. This is a developer feature and one we’re really excited about as it gives us the ability to tell FooGallery to pull images and other media from sources other than the Media Library.

Many people use FooGallery on media-heavy sites for photography, portfolios, video galleries and more. Because of this, many of those same people would like the ability to pull media from places like Dropbox, Amazon S3 and other online file storage services. Those features are coming to FooGallery.

If you like what we’re doing with FooGallery, please consider helping us spread the word by sharing this post.

Also, if you would like to add an advanced lightbox with social sharing or video galleries, we welcome you to have a look at how FooBox Pro and FooVideo can enhance the media display on your own WordPress website.