Summary
A Gallery is a collection of photo albums. You can have as many Galleries as you want
on your web server. Each gallery contains as many photo albums as you want. Configuration
of Gallery and administration of the photo albums is done entirely via an intuitive, web
interface. You don't need special privileges on your webserver to install, configure and
maintain Gallery. It's free, and we (the Gallery team) support it. Gallery works with
several different image processing toolkits and is available in over 30 languages!
To see what may be in store for the future, check out the [Most Requested Features] page.
Administration
Installation/Configuration Wizard
Gallery comes with a handy web based configuration wizard. This wizard helps to make sure that your web server and operating system are set up correctly (screenshot). It also allows you to
configure many of Gallery's options while determining as much as it can from your environment (screenshot). The wizard lastly creates and admin account for you to administer your
Gallery with. Later on if you want to change settings, you can run the configuration wizard and make changes without having to take down your Gallery. [1] (screenshot)
Here are some of the features that you can customize in the configuration wizard:
- Image Magick or NetPBM - pick which image manipulation package you have on your server or want to use.
- Auto Rotate Images - Gallery can look at information in pictures from digital cameras and automatically rotate them as needed.
- Image Quality and Size Defaults - You can limit the quality and size of images so that when images are uploaded, Gallery will resize them to save space.
- Main Gallery Page Settings - The configuration wizard contains all of the settings for how the main Gallery page looks and acts including showing or hiding the album tree, search engine, or album owner, and what frames to show around albums.
- Optional Binaries: zip, jhead, jpegtran - If you have these programs on your webserver, you can enable them to make gallery work better and be more flexible.
- Languages - Choose which languages you want your Gallery to support and how the user is presented with the choice.
- Email Support - Set up email support to have your Gallery email users when their accounts are created or when they forget their password, email you copies, email people when the Gallery is updated, and more!
- Gallery-wide Slideshow - enable or disable a slideshow that includes all pictures in the gallery
- Commenting - turn off or on the public commenting system and configure it.
- Logging - enable logging with syslog or the Windows logger
- RSS publishing - publish your Gallery with RSS! [1]
- Album Defaults - set defaults for the way that all new albums will originally look
Accounts/Permissions
You start off with only one user, the Administrator (login name:admin). This account
can do anything with Gallery. Typically you'll want to use the admin to create other users
(which can also be administrators if you want). Users can be granted permission to create
and maintain their own albums on a per-album basis (screenshot). Users can also self-register [0] (screenshot)
and sign up for e-mail notification [0] (screenshot) when things in the Gallery change.
Albums
An album is a group of pictures and movies inside of a gallery. Albums can be nested inside of each other (screenshot) and can be customized on an individual basis. Albums can have specific permissions (screenshot)
(ie, some users can modify it, some users can add to it, etc), and the album owner can grant permissions to different users. Albums can even be hidden to only allow logged in or specifc users access to even see that it exists.
An album's thumbnail defaults to a scaled version of the first image added but can be set to be all or part of any image in the album. Items in an album can be sorted based on date added, date captured, etc, and the whole album can be deleted, moved, or renamed. All captions for items in an album can be edited at once without having to click on each picture (screenshot). Comments can also be viewed in once place for easy review and moderation (screenshot). Additionally, if polling is enabled for an album, the results can be viewed by the album owner or optionally displayed at the top of the page.
Album can also be easily watermarked (watermarking every image in it) (screenshot) and customized by their owners in a variety of ways. You can change the title, colors, background, fonts, and borders. You can also specify a target thumbnail size and a target intermediate photo size (so that folks with lesser bandwidth can view scaled versions of big photos) (screenshot). The number of rows and columns in an album is customizable, as well as a variety of viewer options.
Photos
If you have the appropriate permissions, you can add photos to an album. A default method is set in the config wizard, but there are several ways to do this:
- Upload a ZIP file full of photos and movies
- Use a form to upload up to 10 photos at each time with and optional file containing descriptions. (screenshot)
- Specify a web page and let Gallery go slurp up all the photos and movies on that page. (screenshot)
- Copy all images to a directory on your webserver and let Gallery copy them directly into your album.
- Use the embedded applet (screenshot) and drag-and-drop pictures and movies to upload them.
- Use Gallery Remote or one of the [Other methods] available.
As you upload pictures, they will be automatically thumbnailed, added to your album, and have intermediate sized images created if needed. They can also be automatically watermarked if you have enabled this feature[1]. Once photos are upload there are several things you can do to manage them:
- Edit the title, caption, keywords, and other custom fields that you define. (screenshot)
- Modify the thumbnail with java applet, selecting only part of the image to show. [2]
- Rotate the image in increments of 90 degrees.
- Move the photo to a different place in the same album or a different album.
- Hide the photo so that only the album owner or logged in users can see it.
- Delete the photo.
- Add a watermark of your choice to your photo. (screenshot)
Mirroring Albums
Gallery lets you mirror your albums on as many remote servers as you like. This lets you run your Gallery on a machine with limited bandwidth (like over a DSL line) but still serve up your images quickly from a high bandwidth source like an ISP. Gallery will not actually mirror the files for you. You're responsible for doing it yourself. I use a program called rsync. You can use whatever you want. If the remote album is up to date, Gallery will use it. If not, Gallery will use the local one. Or see: [Synchronizing your albums with a mirror server]
Connecting
Gallery has a remote protocol to allow software other than the web interface to interact with it.
- Gallery Remote - [[Gallery:Gallery Remote] is a java program that will run on any system that java will run on. Your users can use to upload photos to your Gallery via a drag-and-drop interface [0] (screenshots). On the standard file upload page there is a link to the [[Gallery:Gallery Remote] download page which will download the application from the SourceForge server directly to your user.
- [Other methods] are available to easily add pictures to your Gallery including ones that support Windows XP, Apple's iPhoto, Mobile Phones, perl, python, and more.
- RSS can be used to publish your Gallery and updates to it.
Embedding
Gallery can be embedded in several different content management systems, here are the current ones
that we support:
- Nuke 5.0+
- NSN-nuke
- Post-nuke
- Geek Log
- phpBB2
- Mambo
For the nuke systems, just put your Gallery directory inside the nuke modules directory and you're all set, for the other systems, documentation is included in the "contrib" folder of the source code explaining installation.
Customizing
Gallery is extremely customizable. There are lots of included customizations, many more that you can download, and endless possibilities! There are 4 main ways to customize Gallery:
- CSS - Modify Gallery's style sheets, use your existing site's style sheet, or write your own to control colors, borders, spacing [0]
- Themes - Gallery comes with lots of themes are there are plenty more to download. Check out User Contributions to start looking for more skins and other easy customizations. [0]
- html_wrap - Have an existing HTML template for your site but don't use a content management system? html_wrap is for you! You can include content above, below, to the left, and to the right of gallery to make it blend in with the rest of your site. (example 1, example 2, example 3) [0]
- changing code - Gallery is open source so you can easily change the source code to make it do whatever you want it to do.
The one thing you can't easily do right now is to change the layout from a grid format to something else. However, in v2.0 we plan to introduce a templating system that will let you write your own HTML to do customized themes and layouts (or use the ones that we and other users provide). You can find out more about MANY more customizations further down in the user guide underneath the Customization area
Visitor Experience
Users viewing your album can easily navigate around using the navigation bars at the top and bottom of every album page. Each album can be given its own unique URL. Each photo within the album in turn has its own unique URL. You can use these URLs to get directly to a specific photo from outside the Gallery (useful when you want to email photo links to a friend). In addition to this, the album owner can allow the user to use the following features:
- Languages - Gallery supports over 30 languages and you can choose which language you want to have and how they are presented to the user. The language can be automatically detected by Gallery from the user's browser configuration, or the user can be presented with a drop down box or pictures of flags to select a language. (screenshot)
- Fit-to-window Images [0] - If a visitor has a supported browser, Gallery can dynamically resize images to make them as large as possible while still fitting inside of the visitors browser window.
- Full or Resized Images [0] - Visitors can choose if they want to see the full size images or scaled versions.
- Print Photos [0] - Gallery supports several photo-printing services which allow visitors to order prints of pictures in your gallery.
- Keyword Searching [0] - Visitors can search a gallery for text in Picture and Album descriptions and optional fields.
- EXIF Headers [0] - Gallery can read information embedded in the exif headers of jpegs. Digital Cameras and some photo editing programs use these headers to store information about how and when pictures were taken or created. (screenshot)
- Click Counting [0] - Gallery keeps track of how many times albums and pictures are viewed and displays them on your Gallery so that you know which items are most popular.
- Polling [0] - The owner of an album can choose to include a poll where visitors can vote on which image they think is the best, or what they think of every image. Results can be displayed at the top of the album or only to the album owner. (screenshot)
- Slideshow [0] - Visitors can view the pictures and, if configured, pictures in subalbums, as either a slideshow inside of the browser window or as a full screen slideshow. (screenshot)
- Album Tree [0] - A tree of all albums and subalbums with clickable links to them can be displayed on the front page of your Gallery to provide quick and easy access to all of the albums. (screenshot)
- [0] denotes a feature that is "optional" and can be disabled by the Gallery administrator.
- [1] denotes a feature that is new to the most recent version of Gallery, 1.4.4
- [2] denotes that a screenshot will be available soon
- [3] denotes a feature that will be in the next release of Gallery, 1.4.5
Most Requested Features
These are the features that we have seen many requests for, and whatever we can tell you about them. Once something is implemented, we will make a note of it on this page and delete the entire item at the release after next.
For the current tracker of Feature Requests that have not been reviewed in full yet, have a look at the Tracker. Most of the items in the tracker are categorized so if you can't find the feature you have in mind, try limiting your search to a category and browsing through it. Items for Gallery 1 are marked with a [G1] tag.
Installation/Configuration Wizard
- More Intuitive Install Wizard - We are working on this. It should be the focus of a release of Gallery a few releases out
- More Options - ability to configure the default bgcolor, session lifetime, and php file upload max in .htaccess
Accounts/Permissions
- Admin Authorization - ability for an admin to approve pictures or comments before they are visible.
- Preview Mode - add permissions to allow viewing of thumbnails in an album but not letting people click on them without logging in.
- More Permissions - move album, change your own settings, expiration date, add users
Albums
- Add Album - re-do the add album as more of a wizard to prompt the user for a name, description, etc. before creating it.
- Items in multiple albums - Will probably not be in Gallery 1
- Album Apperance/Behavior - make it an option for inner albums to appear and function like the front Gallery page.
- Specify Format - specify file format for thumb/sized images
- Random Highlight Image - (or most recent uploaded as highlight) probably will not be in G1
Photos
- Other file formats - 3gp/.3gp, bitmap/.bmp, jpeg2000/.jp2, svg/.svg pdf/.pdf, flash/.swf, quicktime/.mov, postscript/.ps, mp3/.mp3, ogg/.ogg tiff/.tif, windowsmedia/.wmv,.asf canon raw (http://www.cybercom.net/~dcoffin/dcraw/) have thumbnails/previews for all of them and embed relevant ones for display. Also support user-customizable file formats to display with a custom applet or something similar.
- Image protection - protect images with a transparent gif over them from saving, prevent hotlinking, etc
- Basic Image Editing - Greyscale, Masking, Brightness, Sharpness, color levels, applying preset filters, etc. this wont be in G1 and probably won't be in G2 but you never know..
Mirroring Albums
Connecting
- Import/Export - the ability to import and export albums or the whole gallery as a single file with all of the pictures and all information from the gallery, for backup,moving things between installations, and allowing users to download a .zip/.tgz/.tar/.tar.gz. Let Gallery use (anononymous/authenticated) FTP to upload images as well as export images. Also do folder recursion for nested albums.
- Item Adding - Item uploading via email or by watching a directory.
Embedding
- Third Party Integration - phpWebSite, phpBB 2.2, phpWeblog, vbulletin, !TikiWiki, XOOPS, cpgnuke, Xaraya, IBP, cpgnuke, YaBB, invision, WBurning Board, myPhpNuke, e107, Typo3, UBB, phpgroupware/egroupware, vbPortal random block, www.xmbforum.com
Customizing
- Customizable Text - customizable colors, fonts, etc. for editable text. comments, captions, etc. some sort of wizard for choosing stuff?
- More Information in thumbnail view - original filesize, number of the thumbnail (for moving picture purposes)
Visitor Experience
- Mail this page to a friend
- Print Services londondrugs.com, mueller.de, HP Photo, www.clubphoto.com, snapfish, www.winkflash.com ww.photobox.co.uk(All the code is there already on www.printbutton.com)
Other
- SQL support - G2 supports this already, it is not a feature that we plan to have in G1
- Summary Page - all thumbs or photos on one page
- Searching - search for new pics and ability to edit captions/keywords as an admin ala the usual edit_captions interface, move albums from results, slideshow of results, etc. basically, treat search results as a "dynamic album"
Requesting More Features
If the feature you want is not on this list and isn't already a feature, submit a new feature request at here and someone will look over it as soon as possible. Make sure to tag it in the summary with [G1]
