Image System Bugs and Suggestions

[zourtney]

This topic will be for any bugs or suggestions relating to the new image gallery we are implementing. It's a little rough around the edges and I'm sure we can come up with plenty of suggestions -- post them here.

[zourtney]

I'll start it off.

I want to be able to make some semi-permanent links to image collections. These collections should be dynamically pulled based off of tags. For example, I might want to make a "francine" collection. The current system can do this via the imagestream view...except that I haven't added the Francine images yet.

Anyway, the problem I have is that I can not control the order of images in the collection. It might be nice to allow arranging them however I see fit (like the old system does), but really, all I want is a "order by date taken" option. Right now, they are displayed by date uploaded. This is not the most useful for collections.

Perhaps we can add another view and have it sort by date taken as the default?

[zourtney]

Ok, so perhaps no one is going to respond to this either but:

I think we need to decide on a standard base url for all new-gallery stuff. I have been aliasing things as /gallery/zourtney/[whatever] for my stuff, kind of trumping the old gallery's url.

I like the looks of /gallery, it's a good one and would like the new stuff to use it. Are we ready to move the old gallery to a subservient looking url? Or should we do something different entirely?

[Nick]

I am all for moving the old gallery url to something more obscure. I don't want to get rid of it just yet as some things are using it.... those those things might be broken once the gallery url gets changed.

If you want to specify the order of images in a gallery then you will have to assign them all weights. Doing this by hand is a little silly so we will have to find (yet another) module to help with that.

Making them sorted by when they were taken should be easy as slapping poodles. We can make another gallery view and pass it parameters for what tags to show and how to order them. I make something real quick for that. Its raining and I have the flue so I don't have much else to do.

[zourtney]

Sorry to hear that you, indeed are down with sickness. (oo-ah-ah-ah-ah)

Another, slightly modified view would be super awesome. I was thinking we make "collections" by creating a new node, slapping a little explanatory text and a view query into one page. We could (should?) then give it an alias like "gallery/francine" and everything would mesh ok, in my mind, at least.

I just have to find the 3 lines of code it takes to query a view again. It was simple, I'm pretty sure.

[zourtney]

I am liking the new gallery styling. May I recommend a little padding around the edges? 5px is always snazzy.

[zourtney]

We need "Rotate CC" and "Rotate CCW" buttons which save rotated versions of the uploaded image...

[Nick]

I looked into that before. I even install a module that added some image manipulation functions but did not add the rotate ability. I haven't yet found an addon that will allow for rotations easily. I guess I can look into the image-field stuff and see if there is an option for it to display an image rotated. Then we would just need to set the number of degrees to rotate.

[zourtney]

Yeah, well...I can remove all my sideways pictures, edit them in photoshop, and upload them again, but that seems like unnecessary work considering we could write a PHP script to do it in very little time...It's just integrating it that I have no idea how to do. Maybe I'll look at modules again, I know someone has done this before...

Unrelated, but still important -- it would be nice to have a view which:

• pulls from all galleries
• has tag filtering
• possibly date filtering
• includes items marked 'exclude from imagestream'

...basically, an imagestream which ignores the 'exclude from imagestream' option.

I was trying to create a link so that I could show everyone pictures from the "Bike Tree" project. I excluded some from the image stream because they were boring AutoCAD screenshots. However, if you were coming from the bike tree's project page, I would expect to see those screenshots.

Also, I had the idea of a gallery content type which can be tied directly to another node. So I can make the "Francine Part 1" story and then have another node with some descriptive text and a wall of images relating to "Part 1." We probably already have the structure in place for that and what I wrote probably makes no sense. Ok bye.

[Nick]

For all the bike tree images... why not have a gallery that contains them all? Images can be in more then one. But I guess if you have already uploaded them all then it would be less work to just make another view (almost no work actually. I would just have to make another page on or clone the image stream view.)

[zourtney]

Creating a gallery probably makes the most sense. We will almost certainly get gallery overload sooner than later, though. I guess I'm stuck in the "gallery is just a group of images with common tag(s)" mindset. Be that good or bad.

I was going to comment on something else, but it has evaded me. Oh well. It was quite unimportant.

[Nick]

I think its worth it to have the other page for sorting and displaying images. We could probably kill the galleries all together and just have pages with hidden sort/filtering options. But then I would have to change things a little. But also, you could then have images without forcing you to put them into a gallery. But if you didn't tag them the only way to find then would be to search by user. But thats more or less what the galleries are now.

[Nick]

Is it time to remove the extra 'random image' box? The one that is tied to the gallery 2 stuff.

[zourtney]

Sure. It's a little redundant to have both, and I think the new one is here to stay.

On a related note, the pager on the random image block is a little weird.

[Nick]

What would you have it look like? Just the next back arrows?