Quick Start Guide to Gallery 2
This guide will get you started with Gallery 2. It will walk you through the steps from zero to managing your first photo album in your freshly installed Gallery.
Note that the http://www.example.com/gallery/README.html that is part of the Gallery 2 download provides the basic steps as well.
What is Gallery 2?
Download and Install
It is suggested you pick the 'typical' Gallery 2 package since it includes the basic set of features. You can easily add more features later.
After installing, you can basically start adding albums and uploading photos. But we'll guide you first through some of the more important configuration options which also serves as a quick product tour.
Configure Site Admin
Once installed, you can configure basic things like enabling email support and enable additional features.
But first, you need to login as Site administrator.
- Click Login in the upper right corner of Gallery. Then enter your username (if you didn't change it it's 'admin') and your password.
- Note: In step 6 of the installation wizard, you entered a username and password for your administrator account. This is the only user that exists after installing Gallery.
Select a Language
- Click Site Admin in the upper right corner of Gallery to enter the Site Administration Area of Gallery.
- Right at the top, you can select the language of your Gallery. Gallery will show all instructions and links in that language.
Also see: FAQ: I changed the language but nothing happens, what's wrong?
Configure a Graphics Toolkit
Gallery can generate thumbnail (small preview) images and resized images for you. Graphics toolkits' are responsible to do such operations on images. You need to activate at least one of the available graphics toolkits. If you do not, Gallery will still work, but you will not see an overview of thumbnail images for each album which makes navigation suboptimal.
If you are lucky, Gallery auto-configured all available graphics toolkits. But maybe, you need to configure it manually yourself.
- In the 'Gallery category, click on Plugins (was 'Modules' prior to Gallery 2.2) in the left side menu of 'Admin Options'
- Scroll down to the 'Graphics Toolkits' category.
- You should try to activate the 'ImageMagick', the 'netpbm' or the 'GD' toolkit. Get at least one of those working first, then worry about the other. If 'ImageMagick' or 'netpbm' are working, then forget about GD completely, it's a total resource hog.
- A green icon on the left shows if the toolkit is active. If there is a 'activate' or 'configure' link on the right, click it.
- For details, please see: Installing an Image Processing Library
Finally, you may want to adjust the priority of the graphics toolkit which basically tells Gallery if it should try a specific toolkit before it tries the other ones. It's a good idea to not have 'GD' as the primary toolkit (it uses too much resources, needs a lot of memory), move it down if possible.
- Click on Toolkit Priority in the 'Graphics Toolkits' category in the left side 'Admin Options' menu.
- Note: You only see a Toolkit Priority option if more than one graphics toolkit is active that can do the same thing. Else there's no point in assigning a priority.
- In the Toolkit Priority option view, use the 'up' and 'down' links to adjust the priority (hint: move GD down if it's available).
- Click 'Save'
Configuring Email
It is important that Gallery can send emails successfully. Emails get sent to recover your user account password, when a user tries to register a new account, and on other occasions.
- Click My Account in the upper right corner of Gallery and enter an email address for your user account, if you haven't already.
- Click Site Admin in the upper right corner of Gallery to enter the Site Administration Area of Gallery.
- Scroll down to the Email section
- Enter one of your email addresses and click Send email to test the email functionality.
- If it fails, you may have to enter the SMTP settings of one of your email accounts and test again.
Configure the Root Album
- Click on Gallery in the top-left corner to get back from the 'Site Admin' area to the normal album area of your Gallery.
- Since you are logged in as administrator, you have the permission to edit any album / item in your Gallery.
- Click Edit Album in the left side menu.
- In the General tab, you can change the album title, description and other attributes such as the default "This is the main page of your gallery" title.
- In the Album tab, you can change the settings for the album and all items within that album.
- Note: This is a good time to learn what the Root Album is.
Two things to remember:
- Most album, item and theme settings are always inherited. When you create a new album, it will have the same permissions, the same sort order, the same theme settings, etc. as the album in which it is created in.
- To change a setting for a complete album, or even for your complete Gallery, go to your Root Album and change the settings there. Most settings have a Apply settings to sub-album option. If this is used in the root album, all albums and items of your Gallery will be affected by such a change.
To change the 'title of your Gallery', you should change the title of the root album.
- Browse to the root album and click Edit Album -> General tab to edit the title of your Gallery.
Configure Permissions
With permissions, you can:
- Control which albums / photos are publicly viewable or only available to your private community
- Control who is allowed to create albums, upload images, post comments and much more
Each album and item can have different permissions in Gallery. And all new albums and items have the same permissions as the album in which they are created in until you change them to something else.
User Groups
User groups simplify the permission management. Instead of managing the permissions for each user one by one, you can build groups of users and then manage the permissions of those groups.
There are a number of built-in groups and users in Gallery and it's important to understand what they are for in order to understand permission management in Gallery.
Predefined Users:
- Guest - Any visitor or user of your site acts as the guest user as long as the user did not login.
- Admin - The site administrator account that was created by the installation wizard.
Predefined Groups:
- Everybody - This includes everyone, even visitors of your site that are not logged in. All guests and logged in users have all permissions that are assigned to the 'Everybody' group.
- Registered Users - All users but the guest user are automatically a member of this group. As soon as you are logged in, you have all permissions a registered user has plus the permissions that are assigned to the 'Everybody' group.
- Site Administrators - Members of this group have full access to any album and to the Site Admin area. By default, only the predefined 'admin' user is a member of this group.
Remember that all permissions assigned to the Everybody group are automatically assigned to all registered users as well.
Set Permissions
Since all albums and items are created in the Root Album container, changing permissions of the root album will affect everything.
- If you are in 'Site Admin', click on 'Gallery' in the upper left corner to reach the root album.
- Click Edit Permissions in the left side menu.
- Here you can add / remove permissions.
Say you want to make your Gallery completly private such that all visitors have to login first before they can see any photo album.
- Remove the [core] View All Versions from the 'Everybody' group and
- Add the [core] View All Versions to the 'Registered Users' group.
Say you want to allow all 'Registered Users' to create albums and to upload items (e.g. photos).
- Add the [core] Add sub-album and the [core] Add sub-item permissions to the 'Registered Users' group.
Create Albums, Upload Photos
Now it's time to finally add some photos to your Gallery. You can add photos directly in your root album, but most users prefer to create a top-level album first and to add the photos in there.
Creating an Album:
- Albums and photos are added in the album area of your Gallery. If you are still in the 'Site Admin' area, first click on the Gallery link in the upper left corner.
- To create an album, click Add Album in the left side menu.
- Just enter a name for the album. You can also enter other things, but a name is all that is needed. Then you can hit Save
Adding photos:
- Click on Add Items in the left side menu.
- Depending on the enabled plugins, you have now one or more methods to add photos to your Gallery.
- You certainly want to try Gallery Remote, the Upload Applet and Publish XP. Those methods make adding a lot of items just with a few clicks quick and easy.
- See: How to Add Items
Add and Configure More Features
After learning the basics of Gallery, you will now want to customize the feature-set of Gallery to your needs.
- Click on Site Admin and then on the Plugins ('Modules' prior to Gallery 2.2) option in the left side 'Admin Options' menu.
- Click on the Get More Plugins tab at the top (not availabe prior to Gallery 2.2)
- Click on the Download Plugin List button. This will contact a central repository (at http://galleryproject.org) to download a list of all available plugins. You should see a progress bar and once it's finished, it should show a 'continue' link which you then can follow.
- Now you can take some time to install the plugins that sound interesting or useful by clicking on install on the 'Get more plugins' page.
Some examples:
- You may want to give visitors of your site the option to register a user-account (with or without approval). Install the Registration module.
- If the 'URL rewrite' module is installed and active, URLs for your albums and images will be much shorter and nicer.
- Activate the 'CAPTCHA' module to protect your Gallery from automated attacks and comment spam.
- Visitors and users can add comments if the 'Comment' module is active.
- And there's much more to explore. See Gallery 2 Modules
Changing the Theme (Look and Feel)
Themes control the look and feel of your Gallery.
- Theme settings can control some parameters of the look and feel. E.g. the number of photos that are shown on each album page.
- You can switch to a different theme to change the look and feel of your Gallery to something completely different.
First you'll want to install and activate more themes such that you can experiment with different looks.
- Click on Site Admin and then on Plugins in the left side 'Admin Option' menu.
- Click on the Get More Plugins tab at the top (not available prior to Gallery 2.2). If the page is empty, click on the Download Plugin List button.
- Scroll down to the Themes category and install / activate a few of them.
You can manage theme settings globally for your complete Gallery via Site Admin.
- Click on Site Admin and then on Themes in the left side 'Admin Option' menu.
- Here you can set the Gallery-wide default theme and sort order.
- You can also configure the default settings for each theme in this view.
Each album can have a different theme and different theme settings in Gallery.
- If you are in the Site Admin area, click on Gallery in the upper left corner to get to the album area of your Gallery.
- Browse to the album for which you want to change some theme settings or for which you want to use a different theme.
- Click Edit Album and click on the Theme tab. Here you can override any of the site-wide default theme settings.
- Note: If you add a sub-albums to an album that has overridden theme settings, it will inherit all those settings. Often this is an unwanted effect. You can specify whether new sub-albums should inherit the global defaults or the settings of its parent in Site Admin -> Themes (only since Gallery 2.2).
Further links:
