Is there any update on this issue?

I really hope WordPress fixes this. It's frustrating and counterintuitive that the scrollbar is there in most browsers but doesn't work! As others have mentioned, many users will not think to scroll down looking for more info, and those that do are really unlikely to realize that they need to use the arrow keys if they don't have a track pad (it's very counterintuitive to use the arrows in a carousel).

Thanks for all the work you've done to fine-tune the galleries--they're a great feature.

Is there anything new about the bug in the scrollbar ?

But on laptop screen a user has to guess that the arrow keys will work to scroll the carousel vertically to see the remaining information on the screen, as there is no way to scroll the carousel vertically with a mouse. I'm a big fan of the keyboard, but the carousel interface is not a normal place for the average user to be using a keyboard for scrolling. It's taken me over a week to guess that perhaps the arrow keys might work to vertically scroll to get to the rest of the carousel. This new carousel design apparently requires a large screen, a highly unfortunate design choice

On my little screen I have the same problem !

One thing the gallery emulates is that when someone adds a comment to an image in a gallery, nothing shows up in the post that features the gallery but only in gallery when you click to open it up.

I think there should be a better way to show right in the post that someone has shown enough interest in a photo within the post to comment on it.

we understand it's not right for every site, so we're giving you the option to turn it off.

Wow! We had suggested that in November 2011. Took you eight months to "understand"...

I wanted to let you know that we've introduced two new options: background color and the ability to disable the carousel in favor of standard WordPress image galleries. We're working to make Carousel something we hope you'll all enjoy — but we understand it's not right for every site, so we're giving you the option to turn it off. The new white version of the carousel is a great fit for those of you with lighter-themed sites. You can see an example of the white carousel in action here: http://mattnt.com/2010/08/23/seaside/#jp-carousel-1291

You'll find the new settings in your dashboard under Media > Settings > Image Gallery Carousel.

Settings screenshot: http://f.cl.ly/items/2I08301e2S1X1c2U050t/settings.png

The intended behavior is to have only the title display if captions and titles match exactly.

OK, good to know moving forward, the problem was that I have hundreds of posts, on two blogs, that mostly use the carousel, where that wasn't the case. You see, back when you introduced the carousel, you stopped supporting the "description" field in the gallery, which was unexpected, and inconvient. So, since it wasn't clear to me which field you were using (caption or title) in the carousel, and in case you changed your minds again about which field you'd support, I decided the safest course of action was to put exactly the same text in all the fields. Just in case you dropped support again for one of the fields, I figured I was covered.

Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine that you would have some kind of supposedly "smart check" for duplicate text in the titles and captions field, and then just decide on your own which one to display in case of duplicates. This is really annoying. It has now broken my galleries, since the text is much too far down the screen to be useful as a caption on the photo, and the caption doesn't appear anymore, since I put the same text in both fields to get around the problem in the first go round with carousel. Ah, the irony.

All of these problem go away if you give us a controls to say "display the caption text, display the title text" in a gallery. Or, even just give us a global control to say "don't hide duplicate text". Or some control that puts us in control of how the text is displayed.

Just give me a choice, that's all I ask. Thanks.

Also, note that if you would like to customize a WordPress.com blog to be different from the theme-defined or WordPress.com-wide features (like the Carousel), you do have the option to purchase a Custom Design upgrade in order to make changes like that. In addition, the WordPress software itself is given away for free, so you can always get complete and full control if you switch to WordPress.org. Both WordPress.com and WordPress.org are great options and it's just a matter of picking the best option for your needs.

I was able to reproduce this issue for themes such as Yoko, Andrea, and Blogum—but the Carousel description paragraph spacing looks fine to me in themes like Twenty Eleven, Sundance, and Vostok.

So, you're saying that is supposed to cause the caption to be blank? Why?

I think the reasoning behind that was based on other user feedback saying that if you upload images without making any adjustments to the media library then the caption and title default to the same thing and are very repetitive.

The first few photos all have the text correctly duplicated in both places, but as you move through the carousel, you can see that some of the photos only have the text in the lower spot, not under the photo:
http://22tue.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/get-thee-to-a-winery-museum/#jp-carousel-3741

First, thank you for posting a specific example! In researching this, we found that any duplicated caption/title that includes a punctuation mark that was converted by WordPress—either an inch mark into an apostrophe, or a standard hyphen into an en dash—is not hiding the duplicate as intended. This issue has been reported to the developers, and so it should be fixed soon but I'm not sure of an exact timeframe.

Just like you did fix the bug that put in the file name when the fields were empty, will you be fixing it so that the text will appear as I type it, in each field that gets displayed, without WordPress making any decisions over what to hide or delete?

The intended behavior is to have only the title display if captions and titles match exactly.

But on laptop screen a user has to guess that the arrow keys will work to scroll the carousel vertically to see the remaining information on the screen, as there is no way to scroll the carousel vertically with a mouse.

Interesting feedback. I personally have always used a scroll wheel on a mouse (which does work to scroll the carousel vertically) and so I didn't think about scrollbars. I will pass along your feedback.

Re the missing titles that @fortuitousmoments reported, I'm seeing a similar problem, where there no text appearing underneath some of the photos, while it appears under some others. For every gallery, I have put identical text in all the fields for each image: i.e., the Title, the Caption, and the Alternate Text fields all contain the same text. So, you're saying that is supposed to cause the caption to be blank? Why? If I put text in the field, I'd like it to show up - if I put identical text in the two fields, then that's my choice. (Of course, in the older carousel, only one piece of text ever showed up).

But that alone can't be causing the text under the photo to blank under some photos, but not under others in my old galleries. For example, in this gallery the text appears in two places (under the photo and further down the screen in huge type) for some photos, but not for others. The first few photos all have the text correctly duplicated in both places, but as you move through the carousel, you can see that some of the photos only have the text in the lower spot, not under the photo:

http://22tue.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/get-thee-to-a-winery-museum/#jp-carousel-3741

Again, for each photo in that gallery the text has been copied and pasted into each of the 3 fields (Title, Alternate Text, and Caption), but the behavior of the text display is different.

So, in general, which piece of text is getting put directly under the photo? Which piece of text is getting put down below? Just like you did fix the bug that put in the file name when the fields were empty, will you be fixing it so that the text will appear as I type it, in each field that gets displayed, without WordPress making any decisions over what to hide or delete? Thanks.

BTW, one more thing about the huge text area that now appears down below the bar: While at least now you have fixed things so that the first line of this text is now visible on an iPad screen, and on on a laptop monitor with a resolution of 1280 x 800, there's still a problem. On the iPad, it is at least plausible that someone will figure out they could scroll down vertically to get to a second line of text there, and then also happen on the comments area.

But on laptop screen a user has to guess that the arrow keys will work to scroll the carousel vertically to see the remaining information on the screen, as there is no way to scroll the carousel vertically with a mouse. I'm a big fan of the keyboard, but the carousel interface is not a normal place for the average user to be using a keyboard for scrolling. It's taken me over a week to guess that perhaps the arrow keys might work to vertically scroll to get to the rest of the carousel. This new carousel design apparently requires a large screen, a highly unfortunate design choice.

@fortuitousmoments, I haven't seen any other reports of missing titles in this thread before yours. I did see some feedback that some people think titles are too far down on the page, and keep in mind that if captions and titles are exactly the same, only the title should be shown. If you're still seeing missing titles, could you point us to a specific example?

I will forward your feedback about reblogging and sharing settings to see if anything can be done about that.

So, how do I turn that off? I don't current put any links for sharing (e.g. Facebook) on the blog, and I have the blog set not to be seen by the search engines. However, all that is for naught if anyone with a blog that is indexed can reblog a post or photo from my blog. I hunted in the settings, but didn't see a checkbox to say "don't allow rebloging".

Please tell me this is a bug that will be fixed ASAP.

(If there was another thread in the forum about this issue, I didn't find it, so I decided to add it here, with the other problems in the carousel.)

@marccalvary, :) happiness engineers are here to help with the new carousel on WordPress.com. WordPress.org is a good decision for you if you do want more control. Both options are good!

Listen, I love wordpress. It's just this one thing that feels like a thorn in my side. It's been irritating me ever since the roll out and I've spent too much time trying to find a work around. Now that I realize it's was there all the time (to not use the gallery feature) I'm fine. I wanted the gallery layout, but I'll settle with the alternative and stop complaining. I'll switch to wordpress.org shortly as well.

If you don't want to invoke the Photo Carousel, your only option at this time is to not use the Gallery feature.

Being the testing ground for new features of WordPress standalone and Jetpack (and probably other Automattic gigs), changes are rolled out on WordPress.com on an average of 16 a day. The majority are back end changes which you may or may not feel and some are front end changes like the Photo Carousel. As I long-time member of WordPress.com, I can tell you that in the near 6 years that I've been here, there have been only a very few times that a decision to implement something has been rolled back.

In the end it really boils down to two possibilities: work with WordPress.com Staff on changes or move off to a self-hosted WordPress.org install where you have complete and total control over what happens on your site.

Sorry for sounding blunt, but it's still early here and I haven't yet had my second cup of coffee.

I also apologise for my temper getting the better of me, it it was more my crankiness at the trashing of my own blog than at your layout which guided my last response. I had already done a full redesign of mine after a lot of messing around with the original and thought I finally had it 'just so'. Then these changes happen...

Thanks for your help too designsimply and for being so patient with obnoxious $^$%'s like me :-)

p.s. I don't know why that oceanandearth liink is still there, but I've changed it to this now http://tomgracephoto.wordpress.com/ feel free to have a look and rip me apart about it :¬D It would only be fair!

1. Cropping of the bottom of my images (in some galleries only for some reason?) an example is this gallery http://tomgracephoto.wordpress.com/coastal/i/#jp-carousel-770

I mentioned this in my reply just before this one.

2. The display of the title, comments and other mess at the bottom of an image thats open in the carousel. I would like this removed or at least be able to turn it off somehow.

At this time, the only way to turn off the extra information is using the paid upgrade for Custom Design which allows you to customize WordPress.com design and layout related features.

It looks very much like a clever ploy by WP to increase profits by forcing people to 'upgrade'.

Not at all. WordPress.com does make money from upgrades, but the software is also given away free of charge at WordPress.org which you can download and setup on your own hosting at any time. In regard to the Carousel feature, there has been a ton of feedback on it, and we're working through that feedback and continuing to update, fix bugs you guys find, and make other improvements along the way too. We take all of your feedback as well as designer experience plus other factors into account when making decisions about these updates.

However, it also seems to happen for portrait images even if the browser window itself is pretty tall, like this: http://cl.ly/Hjkm

For anyone experiencing trouble with images getting cut off, could you please reply with your browser and browser version and approx. browser window size?

The following link will help you measure, make sure to refresh this page if you resize your browser window and it will update the measurements: http://whatsmy.browsersize.com/

It looks very much like a clever ploy by WP to increase profits by forcing people to 'upgrade'. You make a good system bad and then offer that same good system back at an extra cost... Honestly, I'm not suprised but it is disappointing.

"you'll get something much closer to the look at http://thecarbonbasedmistake.wordpress.com/miscellanea/". I have no idea why I would want that, the page layout and look is terrible and the gallery displays the same as mine with all the crap at the bottom?

Plus, if you wanted to use the Custom Design upgrade, you could remove the gray background and borders that appear when captions are present.

I know it's not as simple and it's not a gallery, but it's the closest thing to what you've asked for available on WordPress.com right now.

I'm still having problems, mainly with:

1. Cropping of the bottom of my images (in some galleries only for some reason?) an example is this gallery http://tomgracephoto.wordpress.com/coastal/i/#jp-carousel-770

2. The display of the title, comments and other mess at the bottom of an image thats open in the carousel. I would like this removed or at least be able to turn it off somehow (I don't want to display my lame alphanumeric titles becuase they are not informative or interesting just to help me stay organised). I mean, its a 'gallery', if I wanted pictures and text and other clutter like peoples comments I'd just do a normal post, isn't a gallery for displaying images?

but work like this:
http://thecarbonbasedmistake.wordpress.com/zines/