Gerry 5039

One thing I'd REALLY like to stress...

A lot of us do NOT want a gallery system that is designed around the idea of it being a PHOTOGRAPHY website.  That's a big part of the problem I have with a lot of the various gallery systems out there.  My membership could not care LESS about f stops, exposures etc.  They want an EASY way to upload, share and reuse images of them and their projects that they can use in discussions on the forums, blogs etc.

They want to come to our site and be able to slice and dice the gallery to find examples of the kind of project they are looking to do so that they can see how different options LOOK.  Having categorized images that are searchable and WELL DESCRIBED on the page is crucial to them being able to find relevant images and also greatly impacts the visibility in the search engines.

James

Thanks the 500px gallery looks a lot better than what we have with IP Gallery 4. No ridiculously small thumbnails.

3DKiwi

mikesound, on 09 May 2012 - 09:10 AM, said:

That doesn't mean we have a manpower shortage ... that means we like to focus on things we are working on. Focus leads to better results. Right now we are focusing on Gallery and it will lead to good results.

I hope this will be a massive overhaul implementing most of the customer feedback, and implementing novel technology.

Brandon - that's a lot better than nothing, thank you. Not going for sarcasm or trying to be a jerk, just appreciating any sort of timeline, as wonky as it may be.

I am not nearly as frustrated as Gerry (not a poke at you Gerry, you have a damn valid reason to be pissed off) mostly because the site I have in development is not live and I don't absolutely have to finish it off right away. However, not having a red cent of a clue as to if\when something might change is throwing a wrench into my own schedules.

I'll give you an example or two.

Part of getting data for the site involves me politely asking for the right to post certain types of content on it, basically requesting a license to re-distribute original material. That material squarely involves the Gallery, as it's mostly photography. In order to get the licensing I need, I sometimes need to make deals, such as featuring a given brand's image on the front page of the Gallery for a certain amount of time. Currently, I don't have control over what's featured, and thus I can't even offer it.

Sonya mentioned premoderation being bypassed when a user gets the option to move their images upon album deletion. That (if correct, I haven't ran it myself yet) is no-go #2 for me. I cannot have users uploading into global albums by any means, as that's another area where I have to barter with given brands\people\organizations. Some brands refuse to have their image\advertsing mixed with someone else's, and I cannot risk a relationship by having a user side step something I set and do a bit of mix and match.

For someone running a site where user submitted content is king, everything is fine and dandy. So are Facebook and Picasa in that particular case. For those of us who either have to deal with licensing issues or, like Gerry, have to have approval from powers that be in regard to composition of the site, Gallery feels rather skeletal in admin functions department.

I'm not going to speak for anyone else, but for me the IPS platform is rather lovely and I like using it. I'd like for Gallery to catch up with the rest of the team, but I also wonder if I'm going to be here to see that. As much as my loyalty and likes play into it, I also have to get my site live, preferably this century. Not knowing whether issues that are most important to me are even going to be up for consideration sometime this year is putting a real damper on Gallery being a useful app within my site.

TaffyCaffy, on 05 February 2012 - 03:26 PM, said:

My thoughts exactly.

It's so important to keep the end users in mind. Attention to details that matter most to people. Give the end users what they want on a personal level and you have a better chance of them spending more time in your community. A community as a whole is like a community in life. You enjoy your community as a whole, but you also enjoy your personal time at home with your family and friends.

I agree with you all. Gallery was upgraded but it has many items that were strip from the core part of the system that the previous version had and was function fine before the major rewrite of the system.  Many items to manage image and picture that were great tools have not even been put back and have been lacking going on a year in a few months when it was FIRST release (of current major version). So when my renew came up I let it drop as it was not worth paying month for something that still waiting to be look at because of facebook and social networking choose to be improve
.
What is the real state of IPS with IP.Gallery? Give us more details to anything then just darkness answers all the time. Read all the other forums IP.Gallery is the most request one asking for help compare to others.

Quote

That may well be the case but what we were given with Gallery 4 was a half finished work in progress application. All we're asking for is the gallery to be finished i.e. actually be functional. For me getting a gallery that can be navigated easily and album and image moderation that works in a logical manner is a lot more important than the new Facebook / Twitter integration.

Good to see some of Gerry's problems being addressed.

Nigel / 3DKiwi

In the Facebook world of schizophrenic bursts of images an conversation that are in constant risk of falling off the page and disappearing.

As Owners and Admins of IPS products, we provide our Users with a stable, persistent, long lasting world that they can come back and refer to.

My forum is about what my Users want, and they want to navigate the Gallery the same way they navigate the forum.

example:
Go to the Gallery, browse the list of Album Categories, pick an Album, look at pictures or maybe go to a Sub-Album, see what their friends posted and have fun making comments.

Right now the experience is rather chaotic and unfriendly – it’s like going to a forum website and instead of seeing an organized list of forums, all you see is a smattering of posts that rearrange themselves every time you logon.

As someone that has participated in the design and writing of an image Gallery system for phpBB, I’m left scratching my head, disappointed and wondering what I’ve been spending my money on.

Hello.

I too abandoned my ideas to use the gallery due to all the problems me ruined above.

Sonya*, on 02 February 2012 - 05:47 PM, said:

Jeez, and here I thought I just couldn't find the setting for featured image. This is, in my opinion, a right blunder. My members do not manage my community - I do. As such, I'd like to have control over what's displayed as "featured" within my gallery. As it happens, I would like to feature photos that are directly related to the main topic of my community, and not the latest pic of one of my member's cats.

I'm with Sonya on this - let us set given albums as sources for featured image.

I agree although some of what you're saying I haven't tried out. Permissions and album organisation need a complete rewrite.

3DKiwi

We decided not to use IP.Gallery for the user albums only for global albums with premoderation. There are a lot of issues with permission and I just list them here:

1. The permission "Create new album" does include the permission to create album "for friends only". It is not logical in my eyes that those two permissions are not handled separately.
2. The permission "Create private album" works only if we at the same time allow public (and thus "for friends only") album. It is not obvious for me, why this permission depends on the first one?
3. When user deletes images in his album, IP.Gallery suggests to move his images to another album. Good. BUT it also suggests any global album where premoderation is needed and thus the premoderation can be bypassed.
4. Images from the global album are not shown in the user profile to the visitors. However, they are shown there if the account owner sees his own profile. Why? Any other application shows users content in the profile according to the view permission. Only IP.Gallery does not do this in the user profile.
5. Featured image is picked from ANY album. For us "no go". We have premoderated and clean global albums where we would like to have featured images picked for the start page. User albums are not premoderated, so that we cannot control WHAT is on the start page of the gallery. Live situation on our project - user has uploaded obscene and illegal image that instantly appeared on our gallery start page.

These are 5 major reasons why permissions in IP.Gallery should be reworked.

Good suggestion. Over the weekend I did a gallery clean up and deleted about 60 empty albums. This had to be done manually one by one.

3DKiwi

I've made a hook for this to prune empty blogs.

I'll try to make it to work on Gallery.

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