Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 is ready!

Four weeks ago we released Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 and we're happy to say that the response continues to be overwhelmingly positive. The community support and feedback about features that you'd like to see in the product has been outstanding, and you've helped us track down many issues large and small in the code. To encourage your continued support and patience we're releasing Alpha 3 which has significant improvements!

Intended audience

The Alpha 3 release is still intended for enthusiasts, designers and module developers. This is the right time to do a test drive with the improved user interface and to start developing feature extensions and designing new themes.

Note there is still no upgrade path from Gallery 2 to Gallery 3, nor is there an upgrade path from earlier Gallery 3 Alphas to Alpha 3. Yes, an upgrade is coming but no, it hasn't been a high enough priority yet.

Security warning

This is a technology preview of Gallery 3.0 and as such it is not intended to be installed on public websites yet. The application has undergone a professional security audit, which has identified some security vulnerabilities and will be fixed before the final release. Please resist the temptation to share your test drive with the world and wait for the final release first!

Let's get the download

With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is: Download Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 (1.1 MB) or retrieve directly from the SourceForge repository:

svn co http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery/gallery3/trunk

The Gallery 3 Philosophy

Let's have a closer look at Gallery 3.0 to see why it's so easy and fun to customize. Our user centric development process ensures that the user interface is not an afterthought.

  • Scope and target audience - Before starting development on Gallery 3.0, the target audience and the scope of the application have been clearly defined. Gallery 3 is not a general purpose web application handling any file format you throw at it. And it's not supported on every web platform that exists.

    Prudent decisions helped to simplify the product at a very early stage. For instance, there are no longer item-level permissions. Permissions are managed on an album level. This simplification extends from the database up to the user interface.

  • Simple to use - We're glad to have usability and user interface experts on our team, designing and prototyping interfaces that just make sense, avoiding the dreaded text deserts. The emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks quick and easy. To see an example of this, check out the admin dashboard and the user/group administration page.

  • Size matters - Gallery 3.0 is currently a mere 4.1MB (uncompressed on your disk), with all its features. Compare that to the 16.5MB of Gallery 2.3's bare bones minimal package. Leaving out some levels of abstraction really helps to lose some weight!

  • On the shoulders of giants... - Gallery 3.0 wouldn't be possible without the great advances of recent years.

    • Gallery 3.0 is built on top of Kohana, a PHP 5 framework that makes PHP application development a breeze. Kudos to the folks from Kohana for their support and for providing this first class application framework!

    • Kohana's prowess in elegance and simplicity couldn't be achieved without the vast improvements of PHP 5 over PHP 4. We're glad we can finally seize the full power of PHP 5. Adios, PHP 4!

    • Remember the days before jQuery? We don't want to look back either :-) It has never easier to add interactivity, AJAX or other custom behaviors to your user interface than it is with jQuery. We use jQuery and jQuery UI widely and UI development couldn't be more hassle-free.

  • Simple to customize - Gone are the days of learning 4 different languages (HTML, JavaScript, Smarty, PHP), many different APIs (theme and core API, Gallery 2 smarty tags) and 10 step tutorials to create your own theme. With Gallery 3, you can create your own theme just by copying an existing theme to a new folder. No further changes necessary to make it work. How's that for easy? There's no templating language to learn other than HTML and PHP.

  • Simple to extend - We've exercised great restraint in keeping things simple and it shows in the small size of existing modules. For instance, it takes a small fraction of the code to create a slideshow or comments module for Gallery 3 than it took to implement the same feature set in Gallery 2.

  • Supported configurations - Gallery 3 is supported on Linux / Unix servers, running MySQL 5 and an Apache 2.2 web server with PHP 5.2. Emphasis on supported, not necessarily required. It may well work with MySQL 4.1 on MS Windows as well, but the Gallery team is going to focus its energy on making the best possible product on the supported configurations.

Currently Implemented Features

We resolved 58 separate issues in this alpha 3 release including:

  • Support for database table prefixes (alpha 3)
  • Random image block for the sidebar (alpha 3)
  • Module administration view (alpha 3)
  • Added translation server and localization client (alpha 3)
  • Reimplemented the Flash uploader using SWFUpload (alpha 3)
  • Album sort orderers (alpha 3)
  • Add photos directly from the web server (improved in alpha 3)
  • User/group/permissions management UI (alpha 3)
  • Auto-login at the end of the installer, with a welcome page (alpha 3)
  • Moved Google Maps and Polar Rose modules out of the official package into the community repository (alpha 3)
  • Localized UI with built-in editor (server side support is not finished) (alpha 2)
  • RSS feed for comments (alpha 2)
  • RSS feed for new images or movies (alpha 2)
  • EXIF read support (alpha 2)
  • Add photos directly from the web server (alpha 2)
  • Support for uploading and viewing FLV movie files (alpha 2)
  • Ability to view full size photos (alpha 2)
  • Boolean and full text search (alpha 2)
  • Album browsing
  • Item commenting, comment moderation
  • Spam protection with Akismet and Recaptcha
  • Image toolkit support for ImageMagick, GD, and GraphicsMagick
  • Theme system, including separate admin theme.
  • Module system to extend the functionality, and a series of existing modules
  • Basic metadata boolean search with relevance ranking
  • Flash-powered slideshow (Cooliris)
  • Album media RSS feeds
  • Quick edits of item metadata
  • In place item deletion and rotation
  • User group management (drag & drop interface)
  • Basic user permission management
  • Admin dashboard with drag and drop blocks

Missing Key Features

These features are yet to be added and will be part of the final 3.0 release:

  • Bulk editing of albums and photos
  • A migration path from Gallery 2
  • Improved permissions UI.
  • Basic embedding hooks / instructions
  • (opt-in) Stats collection (helps us to improve the product)

Roadmap

Gallery 3.0 has received a professional security audit from our good friends over at Gotham Digital Science. They've dissected the code and probed it for security vulnerabilities, and then reported back to us. We have not yet addressed all of their concerns in this release, but we will resolve all security issues they discovered before the final release. Your security is important to us!

You can track development on our Trac roadmap.

Got feedback?

If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.

floridave's picture
Quote:
I d like to know how deep the tree can go.

No limit that I am aware of.
I have tried 10 deep without trouble.

Quote:
And any clue on when Gallery 3.0 is totaly ready?

When it is ready, we will let you know.
http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/roadmap?show=all

Dave

_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

MrWerewolf's picture

@bharat Thanks. I look forward to seeing how it turns out.

Quote:
@MrWerewolf: We'll be improving the tags ui and the ability to edit tags in upcoming releases. It's by no means done in its current state.

@aminoff: just to manage your expectations, lvthunder is not part of the development team, he created and assigned the ticket to himself. The implication of that, is that even if he created the module, its not planned for the Beta1 release. In fact, I would go so far to say that it is unlikely it would ever get into the core release, because that would imply that we (the development team) would take ownership of the module...

We are not planning on repeating what happened with G2 where we ended up supporting everything including the kitchen sink. Its this type of functionality that we are looking for the community to implement and lvthunder originally stepped up to it. (We beat this philosophical approach to death in earlier posts)

At best it will appear in the gallery-contrib project where it would be supported by the original creator or the community at large.

Tim
http://www.timalmdal.com

Good day.

I have tested Gallery3 Alpha3 and have found out the following mistakes, some of which already were mentioned earlier:

1. At removal in Gallery of photos from an album (or removal of the whole album) there is no automatic removal from a server of files of photos (a folder of an album)
2. There is no function of registration of the new user by the visitor
3. In admin panel function of creation of the new user does not work
4. At change of the Login and the Password of the Administrator which is given out by default at installation Gallery3, then it is impossible enter in Gallery with a new Login and the Password of the Administrator
5. Sometimes creation of a new album occurs to delivery of the message from Kohana about a mistake though in result the album is created
6. Function "Choose this photo as album cover" does not work, i.e. physically on a server the new file-thumb the chosen photo is created, but in Gallery this new thumb is not displayed, displayed thumb the first photo in an album

talmdal wrote:
@engineer: already identified and fixed: https://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/181

http://www.timalmdal.com

@talmdal: Thank you. I just got gallery3 from SVN few hours ago and installed a new gallery3 on Ubuntu server. "Add user" issue is gone. However, I encounter a new problem to set permission. It was okay on alpha-3. The error message is

---
An error was detected which prevented the loading of this page. If this problem persists, please contact the website administrator.

core/views/permissions_browse.html.php [15]:

Undefined variable: csrf
---

I raised ticket #195 http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/195
and eventually closed with the fix implemented as r20518

http://www.timalmdal.com

@talmdal Thank you for the clarification. From the outside it is hard to see the difference between "the dev-team" and "the Community".

How big is "The Community" and how much is expected to be delivered from it?

@aminoff: It is hard to estimate the size of the "The community", but I would expect that it is quite large given the volume of posts in the forums on this site. As for how much is expected to be delivered from "the community" very hard to say.

If you look at the http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery2:User_Contributions you can get a feel for the type of contributions that have been contributed in the past to gallery2. So it really depends on the motivation and skill of the community members.

Its our hope that the because g3 will be easier to create new modules, (see the developer module in https://gallery-contrib.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery-contrib/gallery3/modules/developer) there will be more contributions.

http://www.timalmdal.com

jureb wrote:
2. lightbox slide show
Yes, you have included Cooliris slide show. But the problem at Cooliris is that you cannot set a picture size - so the small pictures are stretched all over the screen and they don't look nice. I would just like to have them in an original pixels size (as it is in the gallery). Lightbox slide show gives me that option and that's why I prefer it. It also gives me the possibility to download pictures of an album in cache (or in advance) - which is useful because I have slow connection to the server.

bharat wrote:

@jureb: slideshow is a tradeoff of time and energy vs. results. Using CoolIris gives us good results with a very small amount of effort. It would be very easy for the community to write a lightbox slideshow module, so we probably won't put core dev cycles on it.

I believe the scenario jureb indicate here is a valid one. When we have a large image, shrinking it for slideshow could have been equally good for lightbox and cooliris. A small image and to stretching it in cooliris is definitely a different story.

Without much thought on the development effort, personally I would think, lightbox would be a better choice over cooliris.
This is also my choice in Gallery 2.3... Cooliris? sorry, not for me.

Cheers,

bharat's picture

I agree that this sucks, and I'll report a bug to the CoolIris folks. But at least for the Gallery 3.0 release, we're going to be going with CoolIris for our slideshow. If somebody in the community takes the time to write a lightbox based slideshow, it'll be available for you to use (maybe that somebody is you).

florin_andrei's picture

FWIW, I like the G3 slideshow a lot better than the previous one. The slide included in G2 is a usability nightmare.

But I don't have any small pictures on my site. All my photos are in the megapixel range, which explains why I haven't seen the bug.

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/

bharat's picture

I fixed the slideshow issue by having CoolIris not upsample smaller images. http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/205 -- try the latest code from SVN to see the fix!

My wife are totaly in love whit gallery3 She can't wait untill a stabel release.

bharat's picture

@adapter I'm really excited too.. Gallery 3 is going to be flat-out awesome. I can't wait to switch my production gallery over to it! I'm working away on the Gallery 2 -> Gallery 3 importer that will enable us to start switching...

Yes, the best thing is about creating new albums and upload pics its verry easy. Still want that slideshow to show in 3d :D Looks awesome.

nivekiam's picture
Quote:
FWIW, I like the G3 slideshow a lot better than the previous one. The slide included in G2 is a usability nightmare.

@florin_andrei The slideshow in G3 is the same in G2.3.
____________________________________________
Like Gallery? Like the support? Donate now!!! See G2 live here

Quote:
I'm working away on the Gallery 2 -> Gallery 3 importer that will enable us to start switching...

Will the importer import "crop thumbnail" info (in Edit Photo where you can set which part of the photo to be the thumbnail) and the time offset for video thumbnails? I really hope the answer is "yes". :-)

bharat wrote:
I can't wait to switch my production gallery over to it! I'm working away on the Gallery 2 -> Gallery 3 importer that will enable us to start switching...

I saw that the "provide upgrade path" ticket was bumped from Beta 1 to Beta 2. Even without this ticket completed, what's the likelihood that moving from Beta 1 to Beta 2 will require an entire new install from scratch? Dropping new files in without an upgrade GUI is easy enough, if that's all that ticket means...

I am going to install Beta 1 when it's released, but a 25% chance of having to start from scratch with Beta 2 versus a 100% chance will determine how crazy I'll go importing photos. I know, don't use it in a production environment... but for me "production" is my friends and family looking at some baby photos. Not a big deal. Just looking for a guess or estimate... I won't be upset if you say 1% chance and then I have to rebuild it all. :)

Thanks for all you're doing on this project, devs...

- Eric

Album Name/Title

I agree with previous comments that were echoed by many of my gallery members - its a confusing interface for the general user and I hope the old G2 one isn't copied.

It should be 'Folder Name', then 'Title' isn't confusing.

'Add Album' isn't so bad but 'Create Album' would be better.

Looking forward to new G3.
Andy

Album Name/Title

I never had any problem like this and I liked the explicit separation and I hope the default behavior stays the same, or at least can be optionally kept the same. My only suggestions would be to say Path instead of Name, and maybe regular users could have the path derived from the title, but keep the explicit separation available to the admin, since the admin should very well know what's going on.

Looking good guys, I can't wait to move my site over to the new version!

--
http://Dragpix.net/

I have been reading over the progress quite a bit and trying out the new releases as I can. Are things going ok with the G3Beta1 release? This time of year is always kind of rough on personal schedules, so I didn't know if the delay was from a people side of things or technical issues.

Any chance of getting some insights (even if only basic) on how to create modules for G3 so we can start to take a look at setting stuff up?

I looked at the developer module but can't figure out head from tail.

***Edit***
Took a look at the actual G3 structure and it seems to be a model - controller - view structure.

Can work with that.

--
Gallery version = 2.2.6
Default theme = PGtheme 1.3.0
Web Site: dakanji.com

@Dayo: Install the developer module and goto the generate module option. The name is the name of the module (it will also be the directory name under gallery3/modules) Give it a description (this shows up in the module admin panel). Theme callbacks allow you to add content to the theme. Menu Callbacks allow additions to menu... the generator will automatically create a call back for the site menu.

If you need to handle events, then add the Gallery Event handlers that you want.

Press generate and you should have a working module skeleton. just make sure the user id that the webserver is running under has write access to the gallery3/modules.

Tim
http://www.timalmdal.com

talmdal

Thanks. I'll give it a go.

Now this might seem blindly obvious to you devs but how do you install the developer module? I have uploaded it to the modules directory but it doesn't show up under the list of modules in G3.

--
Gallery version = 2.2.6
Default theme = PGtheme 1.3.0
Web Site: dakanji.com

In the last SVN (some minutes ago) I see this if I try to add from the server with firefox:

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 DAV/2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 Server at www.....com Port 80

If I try the same with Iexplorer it slows down freeze.

@Dayo: if the developer module is sitting in the modules directory (i.e. gallery3/modules/developer) then installing should be as simple as clicking on the checkbox on the admin/modules screen.

Tim
http://www.timalmdal.com

I had added an edit to indicate this was resolved but it isn't there now.
I notice the server has been a bit flaky and perhaps a restore was done.

--
Gallery version = 2.2.6
Default theme = PGtheme 1.3.0
Web Site: dakanji.com

Really really really great job. Will quickly replace Gallery2!

I noticed just one little bug not found in Trac: I've some folders named only with numbers, like "20090204", and when I want to "add from server", the folder name that appears is "0".
And it would be great if we could move a bunch of images from an album to another, when I tried to do it in the "Organize albums" view, they disappear (not really, only of the current view) [ edit: ok, just saw it in trac ]

Anyway, gallery3 is like what I was dreaming :)

--
Pierre

"I have been wanting to tag my photos and be able to group them based on tags"

This imo would be a great feature. The ability to group images based on tags. The static grouping of images is ok, but severely limiting. It is not how search engines work for instance. This would be a significant advancement that would invite development (which we are doing along these lines).

drh

Slick. Installation and functions all work 100%. Spot on slick.

As mentioned in a prior message, the ability to sort and create a virtual album based on tags would be a top notch deal, imo.

Looks and acts very well...

drh

bharat's picture

@rogermh: yes, the importer will eventually support that. But currently, we don't even have that functionality in G3 so it'll be a while before we get there.

@Ericular: The goal is that when you install beta 1, you won't have to do any more reinstalls after that (beta 2 will let you upgrade from beta 1, and so on). Releases up to and including beta 1 will require a reinstall. This saves us from writing a lot of upgrade code while things are still in flux.

@Nosaj: yes, there have been some delays on the beta 1 release. We are likely to put out another alpha just so that you guys can look at what we've got before we make it to beta 1 since the bar is higher for a beta than an alpha.

@oriolhernan: Is there anything in the log files in your gallery3/var/logs directory that gives a hint?

@grubshka: I created a ticket for that: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/217

@drhiii: we will be able to provide much more tag-based functionality in later releases. stay tuned!

I'm a fairly new Gallery user, and figured I'd go with the latest and greatest which hopefully will reach beta soon. So far looks great, although I haven't used it too extensively. Just a few comments on it though:

When I try and set the Album Sort Order with Created or Updated time, nothing happens even though I still have the Exif tags, and they have been loaded (via the running the maintenance).

Also, how about a drop down box or something similar so that I can jump to whatever page number I want, instead of having to scroll forward or back?

Thanks for all the hard work guys. Looks great now, and I'm sure it'll be even better by the time you hit 3.0.

bharat wrote:

@drhiii: we will be able to provide much more tag-based functionality in later releases. stay tuned!

This sounds invaluable. Imagine this: being able to issue a URL e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/x/hockey When the browser hits the site, all images with a 'hockey' tag would be pulled together into a virtual album.

Or,

http://www.yoursite.com/y/PhotographerName and all images associated with a particular Photographer would pull together into a virtual album.

This 'search and assembling' functionality would have to exist first within G3 and within the site. But it has long been an idea to be able to craft URLs that could arrive at a site and gen up a virtual album based on criteria assembled via tagging.

The logic and function in the G3 releases so far tho look bang up great...

Methinks this would expand the functionality of G3 enormously. My $0.04.

drh

@drhiii: there is already a ticket in trac for dynamic albums: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/115
of which this would just be another type

http://www.timalmdal.com

talmdal wrote:
@drhiii: there is already a ticket in trac for dynamic albums: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/115
of which this would just be another type

http://www.timalmdal.com

Very good. I had not seen this in the trac yet.

florin_andrei's picture
drhiii wrote:
This sounds invaluable. Imagine this: being able to issue a URL e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/x/hockey When the browser hits the site, all images with a 'hockey' tag would be pulled together into a virtual album.

Or,

http://www.yoursite.com/y/PhotographerName and all images associated with a particular Photographer would pull together into a virtual album

What would be useful to me is album tagging, not just image tagging. So, I tag several albums with the string "sportbikes", and then if a user goes to http://mysite.com/tags/sportbikes all those albums show up as sub-albums inside that virtual album.
That would work very well with a "custom links" block - a simple way for the admin to create a list of custom links and put it as a block somewhere on the interface. The admin could put there links to virtual albums, links to other sites, etc.

I was thinking about this feature yesterday. :-)

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/

GIJosh1516's picture

First off, thanks for all the hours everyone's put in to Gallery (2 and 3!).

Is anyone else experiencing an issue where after logging in, and trying to drill down into an album, you are logged out? This happens consistently from a Vista Business station (IE 8) at my office, but not from my home workstations (My site is hosted locally). Thoughts?

Thanks!

floridave's picture

I think the random logout issue has been fixed, try a nightly build to confirm please.

Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

bharat's picture

@Drizzt321: the sort order code is still under heavy development. Right now, we're not pulling the photo capture date from EXIF so what you're seeing there is the time that it was added to G3. We'll be working on that feature for the final release. As for the dropdown, I agree that's an interesting idea. I'll pass it on to the ui designers.

@drhiii/florin_andrei: what you're asking for with virtual albums and tags is more or less what we have now in G3. Please tell me what you want to see done differently.

Thanks bharat. Maybe I should just checkout the latest HEAD and start poking around and add that in for myself. Haven't worked in Kohana yet, I've used Cake, but it seems like its a pretty good system.

bharat's picture

It's probably not all that hard to do if you're not trying to make it totally bullet-proof. But since we're aiming for a pretty high bar in terms of reliability, we went with the solution with the least moving parts :-)

scaturan's picture

I like the Dashboard and Maintenance Task areas, and how simple it is to switch Graphics Toolkits. Still learning about the new structure of setting permissions.

I had to turn off mod_security for the Flash uploader to work. Simple, but elegant.

But so far, so good!
___________________________________________________
http://pixi.me/

I would love to see calender like layout feature in G3 based on EXIF data. This is already available in
PIWIGO(formally phpwebgallery)

here is the demo page
http://piwigo.org/demo/index.php?/categories/posted-monthly-calendar-2007-1

it lets you see by year, month and calender format.

Is it possible or planned..

@ysandhu: interesting concept. It is not planned at this time, but it is certainly a module that could be developed by someone. We have attempted to make g3 much easier for non core team members to develop and integrate specialized features with their own modules or themes. Check out the developer module at http://gallery-contrib.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gallery-contrib/gallery3/trunk/modules/developer/.

Tim
http://www.timalmdal.com

I can't wait to give this a swing. Does anyone know where I can get some sort of Joomla/Gallery login bridge.

Tombie
Photographer
Okinawa Photography

@Hdr, no one has created any embedding code yet
http://www.timalmdal.com

My error log file shows:

[04-May-2009 11:35:04] PHP Warning: Module 'ffmpeg' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
[04-May-2009 11:35:06] PHP Warning: Module 'ffmpeg' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
[04-May-2009 11:35:08] PHP Warning: Module 'ffmpeg' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
[04-May-2009 11:35:11] PHP Warning: Module 'ffmpeg' already loaded in Unknown on line 0
[04-May-2009 11:35:13] PHP Warning: Module 'ffmpeg' already loaded in Unknown on line 0

I have installed the last svn version.

Also, I can't add from server with IE because the running script slows down the explorer to much (and the OS also) but the images are added.

With Firefox also I can't add from server because I have a message with a Bad Request from the browser.

The key "|" must be included as a tag separator. This is important when importing EXIF data!
With the last subversions of this release now we can say that this will be the best gallery software in some months.

You're right, it is a bit redundant, but at the same time it allows users to create custom urls for their categorial organization.

If user A had /Photos/Vacations/Albuquerque/Sandia Peak Memorial Festival/ they would have a long URL...

If user B had /Photos/Vac/Abq/SPMF/ they would have a much shorter URL.

I use it to put in "."'s instead of hyphens because hyphens bother me...