Large, Complex Gallery - Advice?
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GentleBen
Joined: 2003-12-03
Posts: 9 |
Posted: Thu, 2003-12-04 21:45
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Hello, I am looking to build a photo-website, and would love to use Gallery to do it. However, I am not sure it will work, as the album assembly need to happen dynamically as opposed to statically. There will potentially be tens or hundreds of thousands of nested albums, so it makes sense to instead record the photos into a database (marked with custom fields) and display them in a gallery assembled on the fly based on user input. Imagine a website for Food enthusiasts (for example). Food is broken down into Fruits, Vegetables etc. Under Fruits you have oranges, apples, etc. This structure is run off of a database, allowing new fruits to be added. Users can come and upload pictures of apples. Food enthusiasts can then come in and see these photos, but can also search for, say, the latest photos uploaded of green fruits, or the most popular green vegetables uploaded in the past x days. This is why I am thinking I might have to build the structure manually. So, I need many of the components of gallery, but am not sure if Gallery can already do what I need (are there custom implementations like this?). I will read up on G2 and perhaps it will enlighten me. Sorry about the questions, but I am fairly new to Gallery, but absolutely love it. I managed to get everything up and running after dealing with the Chinese character issue. Feel free to stop by and witness my infatuation with my dog at www.benwest.ca/eurasier |
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Posts: 7985
Hi, GentleBen. It sounds to me like you're really looking for an image cataloging system where the user can enter search criteria and be presented with images that match the criteria. The search results could be dynamically grouped and arranged according to the way that the user wants to see the data. This is very cool.
Unfortunately, this is not what Gallery is all about. Gallery is designed to allow the owner to craft a presentation of images. It's all about enabling the owner to create an experience for the end user and so we don't allow the end user to dynamically change the way that images are appeared and stored. Categorization is organized by albums and the structure and presentation are configured in advance to allow the owner to tightly control what the user sees. Both Gallery 1 and Gallery 2 are designed this way.
You could write a module in G2 that would add custom fields to your images, get those fields to be populated when you upload images. You could also have a module to create dynamic views of the data based on search criteria across those custom fields. I don't see a reason why this wouldn't work, but it's not the main focus of the current code base and it's not the general direction that we're heading in so functionality like this will probably have to come from the user community as opposed to the core development team.
I haven't done a lot of research, but I know that there are other image database apps (I think Slooze is a good example) that might do what you want out of the box. You might want to check them out also.