When you edit a project that has been taken over to FEM, the "View Project" link takes you to a preview mode that makes most things LOOK like you are in your FEM project, but many things don't actually work ( Talk links, Stats links and some others) I am not sure if Tutorial and Field Guides appear exactly as they will in FEM - I have been avoiding the preview mode entirely and going to view the actual project in its own tab where it will open as a true FEM project.
thanks for this heads up!! I see what you are talking about. I think I hadn't noticed it because for most species the first image is a standard trail cam picture size so everything that follows is fine. For example images for deer, bison and fox all look good. But since wolf/coyote has a weirdly long and skinny first picture, it crops everything else. I wonder if this was a problem in the PFE iteration as well, and I just never noticed! I will add it to my list of things to fix - I know the tutorials also need to be rewritten to better match the current interface. I just have to build in time to relearn how to do those updates and then to actually do them! It's been soooo long since the project was built, and someone else did most of the building. I will make sure it's on my list though!! Thank you all!!
Yes, just to clarify, my comments were really regarding the clear differences seen between the PFE and FEM formats (in those two projects), when compared side by side. But any improvement in the size of the image viewer, as you have made, is hugely appreciated! Many thanks.
On my browser, the image size is also responsive - as I expand and shrink my window, the image up for classification also expands (and the species list stays a fixed size).
Reducing the page's zoom level to enlarge the Subject relative to the task panel works for me in Cedar Creek, and in some other projects (FEM or PFE). But in some projects, everything on the page shrinks together. I have not been able to spot the pattern of which projects respond one way and which respond the other way, but I haven't spent much time trying to figure it out, since it's quick to just try it to see what happens.
This makes a huge difference. The images are still way too small for me to use in the default view. If I zoom my browser page to 80%, the relative proportion of image and animal grid come close to what Snapshot Wisconsin looks like. That's ideal for me, but at 80%, the "play" button is "below the fold" on my screen. Compromising at 90% is workable for most images - small enough to use play/stop, but big enough images for me to see the animals - or at least to identify the segment of the image I want to examine, then move and zoom the image, and zoom the browser window to 80% for a good look. Like pretty much everything about FEM, classifications are cumbersome: they take longer and require far more hand movements (relative to the same task in PFE). But this change (along with the recently reinstated mouse wheel zoom) will make it possible for me to classify in survey task workflows, which I have not been able to do in FEM up to now.
Now if only the would eliminate the long frustrating pause during every single classification while the image is grayed out to show the non-dismissable reminder that we have to press Ctrl to make mouse zooming work.
@caitlinbaralepotter
No one has mentioned this yet but your images for the species that show up when you select a species get unfavourably cropped in the FEM version. I think what happens is the image block above the questions is sized for the first image in your samples for that species then any further images are cropped to fit that aspect ratio from the right or bottom. So for instance Coyote - first image is fine, second image is cropped through the body of the coyote etc... The other one that's bad is rabbit. To fix this you likely need to crop some images or make certain they are all the same size and an acceptable aspect ratio for FEM (which appears to change as the page is zoomed) .
It is very frustrating that project details so carefully optimized for the PFE platform get messed up like this.
And just so everyone knows, it is still NOT possible to actually develop a new project on FEM - what one has to do is develop the project on PFE and view it in a preview mode for FEM which has only partial functionality. So even for new projects, they are being still being developed and fine tuned and launched on PFE then later converted to FEM where these issues then pop up.
Hi all! Thanks for continuing this discussion and providing me with some action items (and tagging me, @am.zooni! I lose track of things easily these days). I've removed the subject height limitation now on both of our workflows, and I think that maybe solves @aallan 's issue about unused space too? At least on my browser, I now am getting a pretty large image taking up about 2/3 of the screen with the species list filling the remaining space. It looks like Snapshot Wisconsin still has the older interface, so hopefully I interpreted the issue correctly! On my browser, the image size is also responsive - as I expand and shrink my window, the image up for classification also expands (and the species list stays a fixed size).
Talking of unused space, I've also just noticed what a lot of empty space there is around the task text (list of species) in Cedar Creek/FEM and around the icons to the right of the image.
Apologies if this has already been raised or addressed elsewhere, but I didn't appreciate those differences between PFE/FEM until I just opened the classify screens for Cedar Creek and Snapshot Wisconsin alongside each other in separate tabs. There is so much valuable space wasted on the right of the page, compared with Snapshot Wisconsin/PFE where the image viewer fills nearly two thirds of the screen, and the list of species is, I think, much easier to read without all the gaps.
Sorry if I'm repeating other comments, but it really hadn't struck me before now what a difference it made until I compared them side by side.
Nice change, showing "finished" or "paused" on project tiles in the Top Projects list on our personal stats page.
It would be even better to see those projects listed with most-recently-classified first. I know we can see our projects in most-recently-classified order on our home page, but that page doesn't show the classification counts. (What I am constantly after is updated counts in the projects I'm actively working on. One of mine isn't even in my Top Projects list, and several are near the bottom of my list, while the top of my list has many paused or finished projects where my classification count of course doesn't change.)
Thanks Jim. This has already been mentioned in the discussion about too-small images that started when Cedar Creek moved to FEM, but I will add a comment to that discussion and tag one of the project's researchers.
Nomad, are you saying the problem is fixed in Cedar Creek, or are you referring to another project? I am still getting very small images in Cedar Creek
And also a very wide survey grid. IMO, the former narrower and taller cells was better because it left more screen width for the image. The page side margins, especially on the left side, are also very wide - a pointless waste of space that is badly needed for a reasonably clear view of the images.
That project's numbers dropped for a few days, as they were paused to switch from Animal or Not? to Biodiversity Detective. (There were still several hundred classifications daily even when paused, as is too often the case.)
Thanks @eatyourgreens and @eatyourgreens thanks for your advice. The image size problem has been resolved.
Sadly in the meantime, classification numbers on the project crashed Hopefully volunteers will come back and give it another try.
In this thread a long time ago - 21 July 2024 - I asked "Why has the automatically expandable text field in PFE been replaced with a scrollable field in FEM?", with details about the FEM behavior and comparison to the PFE behavior of text boxes. (I am not quoting it all here, but please click to read - it will open that earlier comment in a new tab.)
I cannot see that anyone every responded to my question or addressed the issue, and I don't recall it being discussed in another thread.
I have been avoiding FEM projects for the most part, and working only on those where there is little to transcribe. I just experience my first real classification (i.e., not testing as I did when I asked about this before) where I entered text that filled more than 3 lines in a text box. As I said in my original comment about it, "This is terrible!".
The font is so large that only a few words fit on each line, and since we can see only 3 lines of the text, it's impossible to proofread what we entered without losing the context. I realize that we can move our mouse or pointer to grab the corner of the text box and drag to expand it - repeating the process for each text box. That adds a lot of time and a lot of hand movement. By the time that is done, how many classifiers won't have their mental focus thoroughly removed from the text they were transcribing?
The expandable text box is what makes it practical - and efficient - to do the kind of transcription we do in most NfN workflows: it's not simply transcription of a block of text, but it requires parsing the sentences and phrases to enter the text for different topics into separate fields. To do it effectively, without incorrect repetition or omission, we need to be able to see what we entered. This process functions really really well in PFE.
I find shrinking the webpage (zoom out, not in) makes the text round the image smaller and the image gets larger, so that can help. (At least that works for some projects.)
What I don't understand it why this started happening. Cedar Creek has been around since 2018 and their images were sized perfectly to fit the screen for years until the project was move to FEM. At first in FEM the images were slightly too tall - slightly taller than in PFE (on my screen, FEM pushed the "play" and other buttons just below the fold. while in PFE the full image height and the buttons below were simultaneously visible). Then something changed (I suspect someone turned on the "limit subject height" function that Jim mentions) in Cedar Creek to make the images very much smaller. Page content is visible above and below the subject, and very wide (3 to 4 times as wide as PFE) margins on each side of the page. The image (and the info in the survey panel) are too small to use.
The "play" and other buttons below the Subject are quite a lot larger in FEM than in PFE (enlarging was a good move but like FEM generally, they were enlarged too much IMO). Otherwise, the Subjects and survey content are the same in Cedar Creek PFE and FEM versions. The system was "smart enough" to calculate the size of the page elements to fit the maximum subject height along with necessary other elements (like "play") within the available size of the browser window. But that ability appears to have been lost in the transition to FEM. It's highly frustrating to no longer be able to classify in projects we have enjoyed for years.
Try asking the project teams if they can turn off ‘Limit Subject Height’. It’s a checkbox in the project builder. Turning it off allows the subject image to expand beyond the height of the browser window.
Talk is a place for Zooniverse volunteers and researchers to discuss their projects, collect and share data, and work together to make new discoveries.
April 24th 2025, 5:43 pm
@caitlinbaralepotter Let me know if there is anything I can help with!
When you edit a project that has been taken over to FEM, the "View Project" link takes you to a preview mode that makes most things LOOK like you are in your FEM project, but many things don't actually work ( Talk links, Stats links and some others) I am not sure if Tutorial and Field Guides appear exactly as they will in FEM - I have been avoiding the preview mode entirely and going to view the actual project in its own tab where it will open as a true FEM project.
April 24th 2025, 3:59 pm
thanks for this heads up!! I see what you are talking about. I think I hadn't noticed it because for most species the first image is a standard trail cam picture size so everything that follows is fine. For example images for deer, bison and fox all look good. But since wolf/coyote has a weirdly long and skinny first picture, it crops everything else. I wonder if this was a problem in the PFE iteration as well, and I just never noticed! I will add it to my list of things to fix - I know the tutorials also need to be rewritten to better match the current interface. I just have to build in time to relearn how to do those updates and then to actually do them! It's been soooo long since the project was built, and someone else did most of the building. I will make sure it's on my list though!! Thank you all!!
April 24th 2025, 9:15 am
Yes, just to clarify, my comments were really regarding the clear differences seen between the PFE and FEM formats (in those two projects), when compared side by side. But any improvement in the size of the image viewer, as you have made, is hugely appreciated! Many thanks.
April 23rd 2025, 10:48 pm
I also meant to respond to
Reducing the page's zoom level to enlarge the Subject relative to the task panel works for me in Cedar Creek, and in some other projects (FEM or PFE). But in some projects, everything on the page shrinks together. I have not been able to spot the pattern of which projects respond one way and which respond the other way, but I haven't spent much time trying to figure it out, since it's quick to just try it to see what happens.
April 23rd 2025, 10:34 pm
Thank you @caitlinbaralepotter, you're a star. And also thanks again Jim.
This makes a huge difference. The images are still way too small for me to use in the default view. If I zoom my browser page to 80%, the relative proportion of image and animal grid come close to what Snapshot Wisconsin looks like. That's ideal for me, but at 80%, the "play" button is "below the fold" on my screen. Compromising at 90% is workable for most images - small enough to use play/stop, but big enough images for me to see the animals - or at least to identify the segment of the image I want to examine, then move and zoom the image, and zoom the browser window to 80% for a good look. Like pretty much everything about FEM, classifications are cumbersome: they take longer and require far more hand movements (relative to the same task in PFE). But this change (along with the recently reinstated mouse wheel zoom) will make it possible for me to classify in survey task workflows, which I have not been able to do in FEM up to now.
Now if only the would eliminate the long frustrating pause during every single classification while the image is grayed out to show the non-dismissable reminder that we have to press Ctrl to make mouse zooming work.
April 23rd 2025, 8:02 pm
@caitlinbaralepotter
No one has mentioned this yet but your images for the species that show up when you select a species get unfavourably cropped in the FEM version. I think what happens is the image block above the questions is sized for the first image in your samples for that species then any further images are cropped to fit that aspect ratio from the right or bottom. So for instance Coyote - first image is fine, second image is cropped through the body of the coyote etc... The other one that's bad is rabbit. To fix this you likely need to crop some images or make certain they are all the same size and an acceptable aspect ratio for FEM (which appears to change as the page is zoomed) .
It is very frustrating that project details so carefully optimized for the PFE platform get messed up like this.
And just so everyone knows, it is still NOT possible to actually develop a new project on FEM - what one has to do is develop the project on PFE and view it in a preview mode for FEM which has only partial functionality. So even for new projects, they are being still being developed and fine tuned and launched on PFE then later converted to FEM where these issues then pop up.
April 23rd 2025, 6:28 pm
Hi all! Thanks for continuing this discussion and providing me with some action items (and tagging me, @am.zooni! I lose track of things easily these days). I've removed the subject height limitation now on both of our workflows, and I think that maybe solves @aallan 's issue about unused space too? At least on my browser, I now am getting a pretty large image taking up about 2/3 of the screen with the species list filling the remaining space. It looks like Snapshot Wisconsin still has the older interface, so hopefully I interpreted the issue correctly! On my browser, the image size is also responsive - as I expand and shrink my window, the image up for classification also expands (and the species list stays a fixed size).
April 23rd 2025, 3:17 pm
Talking of unused space, I've also just noticed what a lot of empty space there is around the task text (list of species) in Cedar Creek/FEM and around the icons to the right of the image.
Apologies if this has already been raised or addressed elsewhere, but I didn't appreciate those differences between PFE/FEM until I just opened the classify screens for Cedar Creek and Snapshot Wisconsin alongside each other in separate tabs. There is so much valuable space wasted on the right of the page, compared with Snapshot Wisconsin/PFE where the image viewer fills nearly two thirds of the screen, and the list of species is, I think, much easier to read without all the gaps.
Sorry if I'm repeating other comments, but it really hadn't struck me before now what a difference it made until I compared them side by side.
April 23rd 2025, 3:02 pm
Nice change, showing "finished" or "paused" on project tiles in the Top Projects list on our personal stats page.
It would be even better to see those projects listed with most-recently-classified first. I know we can see our projects in most-recently-classified order on our home page, but that page doesn't show the classification counts. (What I am constantly after is updated counts in the projects I'm actively working on. One of mine isn't even in my Top Projects list, and several are near the bottom of my list, while the top of my list has many paused or finished projects where my classification count of course doesn't change.)
April 23rd 2025, 2:16 pm
Thanks Jim. This has already been mentioned in the discussion about too-small images that started when Cedar Creek moved to FEM, but I will add a comment to that discussion and tag one of the project's researchers.
April 23rd 2025, 8:59 am
Hey @Sunray_2013
Thank you for checking in! It may take some time. I will be in touch via email before we post it.
April 23rd 2025, 8:20 am
It’s working on my phone now, too.
April 23rd 2025, 8:19 am
@am.zooni ask the Cedar Creek team if they can turn off ‘Limit Subject Height’ in the project builder. That should fix the problem.
April 23rd 2025, 12:23 am
Nomad, are you saying the problem is fixed in Cedar Creek, or are you referring to another project? I am still getting very small images in Cedar Creek
And also a very wide survey grid. IMO, the former narrower and taller cells was better because it left more screen width for the image. The page side margins, especially on the left side, are also very wide - a pointless waste of space that is badly needed for a reasonably clear view of the images.
That project's numbers dropped for a few days, as they were paused to switch from Animal or Not? to Biodiversity Detective. (There were still several hundred classifications daily even when paused, as is too often the case.)
April 23rd 2025, 12:08 am
Thanks @eatyourgreens and @eatyourgreens thanks for your advice. The image size problem has been resolved.
Hopefully volunteers will come back and give it another try.
Sadly in the meantime, classification numbers on the project crashed
April 22nd 2025, 1:53 pm
No force, but when is it coming out?
April 20th 2025, 9:40 pm
In this thread a long time ago - 21 July 2024 - I asked "Why has the automatically expandable text field in PFE been replaced with a scrollable field in FEM?", with details about the FEM behavior and comparison to the PFE behavior of text boxes. (I am not quoting it all here, but please click to read - it will open that earlier comment in a new tab.)
I cannot see that anyone every responded to my question or addressed the issue, and I don't recall it being discussed in another thread.
I have been avoiding FEM projects for the most part, and working only on those where there is little to transcribe. I just experience my first real classification (i.e., not testing as I did when I asked about this before) where I entered text that filled more than 3 lines in a text box. As I said in my original comment about it, "This is terrible!".
The font is so large that only a few words fit on each line, and since we can see only 3 lines of the text, it's impossible to proofread what we entered without losing the context. I realize that we can move our mouse or pointer to grab the corner of the text box and drag to expand it - repeating the process for each text box. That adds a lot of time and a lot of hand movement. By the time that is done, how many classifiers won't have their mental focus thoroughly removed from the text they were transcribing?
The expandable text box is what makes it practical - and efficient - to do the kind of transcription we do in most NfN workflows: it's not simply transcription of a block of text, but it requires parsing the sentences and phrases to enter the text for different topics into separate fields. To do it effectively, without incorrect repetition or omission, we need to be able to see what we entered. This process functions really really well in PFE.
cc: @md68135
April 19th 2025, 3:57 pm
I find shrinking the webpage (zoom out, not in) makes the text round the image smaller and the image gets larger, so that can help. (At least that works for some projects.)
April 19th 2025, 3:07 pm
What I don't understand it why this started happening. Cedar Creek has been around since 2018 and their images were sized perfectly to fit the screen for years until the project was move to FEM. At first in FEM the images were slightly too tall - slightly taller than in PFE (on my screen, FEM pushed the "play" and other buttons just below the fold. while in PFE the full image height and the buttons below were simultaneously visible). Then something changed (I suspect someone turned on the "limit subject height" function that Jim mentions) in Cedar Creek to make the images very much smaller. Page content is visible above and below the subject, and very wide (3 to 4 times as wide as PFE) margins on each side of the page. The image (and the info in the survey panel) are too small to use.
The "play" and other buttons below the Subject are quite a lot larger in FEM than in PFE (enlarging was a good move but like FEM generally, they were enlarged too much IMO). Otherwise, the Subjects and survey content are the same in Cedar Creek PFE and FEM versions. The system was "smart enough" to calculate the size of the page elements to fit the maximum subject height along with necessary other elements (like "play") within the available size of the browser window. But that ability appears to have been lost in the transition to FEM. It's highly frustrating to no longer be able to classify in projects we have enjoyed for years.
April 19th 2025, 7:18 am
Try asking the project teams if they can turn off ‘Limit Subject Height’. It’s a checkbox in the project builder. Turning it off allows the subject image to expand beyond the height of the browser window.
That setting can also have unintended side effects on tablets and small screens.
https://github.com/zooniverse/front-end-monorepo/issues/6061