Critiki now has close to 7,000 photos, all added by Critiki’s members. Each and every picture that gets added to Critiki goes through a quick review, where I tag them. Those tags make it possible to browse some useful albums of Polynesian Pop imagery: you can see all of the matchbooks in Critiki, or all of the postcards, you can see an album filled with just tapa cloth, or A-frames, or outriggers. It’s a fun way to immerse yourself in tiki for a bit, and I hope it can also be useful for folks doing a bit of research for creative projects or bar buildouts.

This feature of Critiki isn’t new, but it might as well be. The albums worked okay when I first built them, but over the years, these albums have grown and grown and GROWN. The old interface was too hard to use for that many photos.

But these new albums! They’re dreamy. So easy to scan through all the thumbnails quickly—and, like the location picture albums, the pictures only load when you need them, so it’s zippy. When you are looking at pictures full-size, it’s got all those swipey, zoomy features you know and love, and you can use your keyboard’s arrow keys to flip through quickly.

You’ll find a link to Critiki’s Picture Albums right on the home page, it looks like this. ↑

Have your own pictures you’d like to add? All of these pictures get added via a location in Critiki. For instance, if you have an old menu from the Tonga Room in San Francisco, you’d add that picture from the Critiki page for the Tonga Room, and once the picture has been reviewed, it will appear in the Menus picture album in addition to the Tonga Room picture album.

Now that these albums are a bit more functional, I’m already daydreaming about adding some new tags. Enjoy!

• Critiki’s Picture Albums