Trovebox is an online photo and video management service for businesses that is used by small businesses, non-profits and enterprises. We offer secure photo sharing, group photo collaboration features, multi-user accounts and whitelabeling. Learn more about Trovebox and see our pricing plans.
It took years before we added video support for Trovebox. Once we decided it was time to finally do it we took a few steps back to understand how videos fit into an organization’s media repository.
When we came up with the user interface and experience for viewing photos we wanted to accomplish 3 goals.
- Make it easy and pleasurable to view lots and lots of photos.
- Show large enough previews that you usually didn’t need to see the larger version.
- Display only what mattered.

The result was our fixed height masonry layout*. In addition to our stated goals the layout had several unintended benefits.
The biggest benefit was leveraging your brain’s trained ability to scan from left to right. Viewing photos this way felt much more natural than we originally anticipated; especially when part of a chronological series.
Another benefit was how beautiful a panoramic photo looked. We blew our own minds when we saw how a scenic panorama seamlessly fit alongside other photos. It completely changed the experience of viewing photos.
Now that we wanted to support videos we asked ourselves the same questions. What did we want to accomplish? We came up with 3 goals.
- Apply the same goals we had for photos to videos.
- Coalesce photos and videos into the same interface.
- Keep video playback as lightweight of an action as possible.
Prototyping a user interface and experience gives you about 80% of an idea how effective the prototype is in reality. Like all 80/20 rules the last 20% is the most important. When you start putting live content into the prototype it reveals the good, bad and ugly.
In our case it was all good. Fantastic, actually. Viewing photos and videos inherited all of the benefits from viewing just photos. Video previews have a subtle play icon overlayed to indicate that it can be played. Upon clicking the icon the video instantly begins to play inline. Much like the photo previews the videos are large enough that you often don’t need to see the larger version.
It’s the lightest weight video viewing experience we’ve seen. We didn’t really grasp how much we’d love it until we started seeing our own photos and videos in this new layout.
Ready to see it in action? I’ve embedded a personal gallery of my own containing videos and photos. It’ll work directly from this blog post or you can view the full site.
* Thanks to Florian Maul for his masonry JavaScript library.
** Photos from first screenshot by Duncan Rawlinson