In the continuing thread of testing how far we can go towards reproducing rich client applications on the web, I’m currently working on a photo management application that is in need of a light table. The need is for the ability to drag photos around, compare, resize, and edit their basic attributes.

The prototype of this specific interface is interesting enough that I figure it’s worth sharing.

It’s pretty limited, in that it represents a specific state in a larger application and is very early work. It’s also pretty likely to break. Please use or modify it with that in mind.

Note that this is for Firefox and Safari only. Modifying it to work in IE will be a pain, and is not worth the effort while this is a proof of concept.

A note about browsers

The experience using this is significantly better with Safari. Firefox has two behaviors that limit usefulness; one of which is Mac-specific.

1) The previously mentioned crippling, 3 year old bug for OS X. Therefore, there is noticable chop when dragging.

2) Firefox image scaling is pretty terrible. Here is a zoomed comparison of two scaled images (FF then Safari).

With that said. If you’re using a Mac to view this, please use Safari. If you’re interested, you can download the source and images.