Cross post: project outline and UI design for an AJAX powered image gallery

Not a precise idea yet, as we still have to figure out how we will build some functionality. So far, our first estimation would be around 80 hours.
The setup would actually be manually, but beside the design, my job will be to provide a big documentation for this module, using slides and set up a story on drupal.org with all the steps to set up a gallery.

Roughly these steps are :

• create a cck for the gallery
• create a cck for the images with an imagefield
• activate and associate the two cck in the admin section of the module.

The Drupal Agency >> www.raincitystudios.com <<
Me on the Web >> www.couzinhub.com <<

I would leave gallery display to views. In the configuration, you can set up a view to use for gallery display. The gallery module would provide a default view for this, and would embed the selected view on the node/[nid-of-gallery] page. The view would just contain all nodes of the photo nodetype that reference the selected gallery. The gallery module would also provide a nice view style that looks as in your gallery viewing mockups, if there isn't something like this already there. This makes gallery display completely configurable and advanced users can even just create their own view.

So actually, the main thing for the gallery module to do is to provide a good administration/gallery creation UI, including stuff like mass upload.
Oh, in your document you mention that users should be able to simply select a folder on their hard drive and then having automatically uploaded all images - I could be wrong, but I don't think that this is possible without using flash or some other proprietary browser plugin. Alternatives would be allowing to upload a zip file containing all the images, allowing to specify a directory on the web server where the images have been transfered to before, e.g. with ftp, or using something like flash or Java. If there's any other solution: yes please!

Let's start discussion on irc
* freenode, #drupal-image,
* Monday 16th June (Vancouver time PT = 10am)

Agenda
* meet other potential contributors
* discuss workflow and features

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=6&day=16&year...

Thanks Aufumy !!

I was just reading over the gDoc that you guys posted with the transcript from you meeting. I'm excited to see some great minds working to solve all the issues with images and galleries.

Image order in galleries with nodequeue ...

I don't quite see how nodequeue can be used for specifying the order of photos within a gallery. This would mean that each gallery would have it's own nodequeue. I probably just don't have enough experience with nq yet to know how to set that up. My understanding of nq is that you create a queue and specify which node types can be put into the queue. Can it be configured so that a nq is created when an administrator creates a new gallery?

Hmmm ... I just did some more research and it seems that a taxonomy smartqueue could be used to this exact thing as long as galleries were set up to be terms in a taxonomy and not nodes (though there may be an equiv. type of smartqueue for specific node types).

I'm curious how this process will look to the admin. What steps would be involved? What permissions would need to be given to enable the admin to create/manage the galleries. Could it be set up so that the photo is automatically added to the end of the smartqueue when an admin assigns a photo to a gallery(tax.term)? It would be confusing if two steps were required to get the image to show up in the queue. How difficult would it be to customize the queue editing page so that it could include thumbnails of the images that are being sorted. It would suck if users only saw the titles of the photos.

Bulk Upload Questions

Can the swfupload module handle creating the image nodes? Since we want to store each image in it's own node, the bulk uploader will need to be able to create a new node for each image that is uploaded, and assign that image to the imagefield for that node. It should also be able to assign a gallery term to all the images in the upload, so that they are associated with the correct gallery.

Views for Gallery Display

I too vote for leveraging the power of views to display the galleries/slideshows. It ties into many modules including the Views Slideshow which I've heard a lot of good things about and would like play around with more.

Very nice demonstration indeed, we should really think about all these features when creating the UI. I really like how you can not only create galleries quickly, but also create several galleries at once, and how it's a real image manager.

The discussions are still going on, every monday morning at 11am (vancouver time). tomorow (monday 30th june) we are going to have some new peeps participating to the discussion :

Ronan Berder alias hunvreus, who has already worked on some image module, including the very promising Image Annotate, who has started top work on an image gallery module using swfupload :)
http://drupal.org/project/image_annotate

Kris Vanderwater alias EclipseGc : The author of Imagefield Gallery, who is in the process of finishing Imagefield Gallery version 2.0 for drupal 5, and have some great projects for the version 3.0 on drupal 6.
http://drupal.org/project/imagefield_gallery

Everyone is welcome to join us :) !

Out of interest, what's the status on this? I'm quite interested.

I cranked out a custom AJAX-drive (with standard link failover incase the JS fails or the browser disables JS) gallery based on a node with a set of node references to the actual images, which then uses a bunch of functions in a module to display the gallery & AJAX functionality. A major problem was the loading the comments, or more specifically, returning to the gallery when the visitor submits a comment, which also caused problems with the Mollom module, but I finally got it working kinda OK. It definitely would need a lot of improvement before I'd consider asking management if I could released it, maybe when we migrate from d5 to d6 I'll get a chance to clean it up.

Good to see some fresh discussion here. Looks like there's been some promising development over the past few months.

For those not aware, there is an ongoing media sprint in which some of the desired features/functionality is already being worked out. There is also an effort to leverage the Drupal Dojo to promote these efforts and 'virtually' collaborate.

It would be great to put a session or two together in which we can compare and contrast the various options and collaborate on common solutions. I'd definitely be into helping facilitate.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

It really sounds great! I'm not a coder also, but I hope you will be able to apply your idea into practice. In the meanwhile, I use picassa for my images gallery, but I find it too poor.

Sally,
Professional Web Design Company