Gallery2:Usability Issues:Survey:permissions - Gallery Codex
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Gallery2:Usability Issues:Survey:permissions

From Gallery Codex

What do you not like in Gallery 2?
Permissions interface is confusing.

Permissions, user and user group management, lacking

display control of content on album pages (hacking required)

The permissions seem like they are all or nothing. If you wont to allow user to control their items but not change things such as album name on the local disc it is difficult

without a custom module.

Hide function : would still like a owner hide function (maybe it would do a permission sweep from pull down on photo). This would affect that picture and hide it so unless you

were owner you would not see it.

User management system is something to be desired. The interface isn't the best as it's limited and confusing. In addition, the permissions for users and groups isn't the most

reliable thing in the world.

Smarty as a templating/themeing system. I'd much rather have a PHPTemplate engine like Drupal's. It's very slow without a PHP accelerator (running on older hardware). Even with the accelerator, the performance is marginal. UI for setting

permissions is complex and requires a lot of page refreshes.
user rights management is cumbersome

I love the individual permissions for every item but I hate how annoying it is to just have a handful of items in an album have different permissions. There needs to be a better way to view and manage permissions. I also found setup of movie

playback to be far too annoying and fragile.

Users permissions administration panel should be

easier
Permissions interface

1. Control of some items seems to be in the wrong "level" or at the wrong "scope." Example: "Square Thumbnails" and in particular the background color used should be a theme or album setting, not a Gallery setting. Another: Hiding the top level breadcrumb would seem to belong in a permission setting, not an album, theme or Gallery setting 2. Often many ways to accomplish the same task, but no way to disable the redundancy. Example: navigation. Click on the image, click on an icon, click in the sidebar, click in the breadcrumbs. 3. Difficult to correctly guess where a setting might be controlled -- is it a Site setting? a Theme setting, an Album setting? I can sometimes see a logic to the distribution, but usually not. 4. Difficult to "quiet down" the interface. I've spent quite a while trying to figure out where all the extra decorations are so I can SUPPRESS them. If someone wants a "minimalist" Gallery, it's difficult to do. 5. MUCH too slow. In a test gallery, a main page has a link to a gallery with 4 albums. It routinely takes TWENTY SECONDS for the Gallery page

to load.
setting the permissions of an album

I cannot set the default permissions for new albums in a way that not everyone can see them, i.e. I need to do much config per (sub)album to force logins to view them. There is no (quick) option to mark a set of pictures for movig/deleting, or other option. I want to see an option to select/mark the fotos while I'm viewing them. When I selected all the fotos that I want,

I can do the action I wish with it (Download,Delete,Move etc.)

permissions. setting permissions for album owners is non-existant. the interface is bad and the help on the site is not specific. it would be great to be able to do this simply and not

have to code workarounds

The biggest thing I dislike about Gallery 2 is how picture comments and picture ratings are displayed in the default skin. I also find it awkward to manage group permissions for

different sections of the gallery.

I use Gallery 2 (http://www.transportimages.com) to host other people photos, not just my own. The current permissions system is way over-complex and does not really allow me to set the permissions I want. I don't want users to own albums, but just want them to own photos. This is possible at the current time, but means I have to manually upload photos for my users and then amend

individual photo permissions.

The mass confusion about name/title/summary/description. Why are there four fields that are basically indistinguishable? Why do some show up in some views and not in others? I\'d much prefer if this were 1 or *at most* 2 fields- name and description. There is lots of other redundancy in the UI, too- what is the difference between \'rearrange items\' and \'reorder items\'? Why are those not the same? Or better yet, why can\'t they be dropped altogether and just let the admin do that through dragging and dropping in the main gallery view? In the admin view, The general primitiveness of the UI is unfortunate- lots of things should be instant-apply/ajaxy. For example, if I\'m an admin, I should be able to just click on a picture\'s captions to edit them, instead of finding \'edit item\', then finding the right field, then hitting save. It takes way too many clicks and too much eye motion to do lots of very common operations like rotating a picture. Module installation is another good example of redundancy- why must I install, and *then* activate? Is there any good reason why I would install something, and then not immediately activate it? Not that I can think of. Ugly default URLs suck. URLs should be beautiful by default. Oh, and performance. Performance of g2 sucks. Every time google spiders me my server goes to its knees. Speed is a feature:

http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2006/02/23/speed-is-a-feature/
manipulating access rights

Even though the user perrmissions are very vest there are a few areas where they are missing. Hopefully every option in gallery can be controlled by a permission at somepoint.

The permission system Upload system (would like a

faster better way)

Permissions are tricky to manage especially for subtrees of the album structure. Sometimes I want to be able to just give people a password and not an account. Moving items to other albums gives a huge list of albums that are not easily selectable in tree form (e.g. I have to scroll through all sub-albums of every tree). Deleting single photos is cumbersome. In general some sort of selection mechanism on the main pages would be nice so that you could select a number of images (similar to the shopping cart) and perform an action on those images, instead of choosing the action and then selecting which photos to apply it to. If an item does not have a description I would like it to display the summary text. Even if it does have a description it would be nice to see the summary on the item\\\'s page and not

just in the thumbnail view.

Permissions are a horrible ordeal to establish. There needs to be a way to use CheckBoxes to tick the requested permissions, or select the photos in bulk then apply permissions. If an album is 50/50 public/private then going through and

downgrading or upgrading permissions is a hassle.

It's too hard to put flash movies in. The permissions UI is very difficult to use, and there are way too many options in the admin section. They should be grouped together by functionality, or we could be given the option of how to group

them.
Permission management Complexity in Map Module

I can not get it working after weeks of trying. I keep trying, but I get a 'platform error" I am sure it is something to do with not knowing about permissions. I have tried to set everyting to 777 and still I get platform errors when I try

to change a title. (as administrator)

User permissions and control is a bit too 'spread

out'.

RSS doesn't seem to work. setting permissions on

groups of albums and photos seem a little clumsy
Difficult to manage user permissions.

I am not sure how best to apply permissions. It doesn't appear easy to say that this group of users has a particular permissions set for this group of images or albums

without going to each one individually.
user permissions. i find it very difficult to use.

complex admin menus, user management, permission

management
user&permission administration

Permissions UI

Too complex to administer and customize. I spent many hours before I got it just right. Built-in color packs are

dog ugly :) Lack of dynamic themes (using DHTML/Ajax)

Permissions are not very easy to use nor error

proof.

User permissions not sufficient sophisticated

(compared to 4images) e.g. inheritance of rights of sub albums

* overview of permissions is difficult * dynamic

albums should be better

Permissions are difficult to set up. I believe I

more or less understand it, but the interface is complicated.