Sub-Albums

[sectioni]

You've created a superb product - It blows Gallery2 away in terms of speed, flexibilty and usability.  Sadly, I cannot use it for reasons mentioned many times in these forums - sub-albums.  I run a sports web site.  I need albums for each team and then sub-albums of each individual game.  I tried messing around with categories and sub-categories.  I guess I could make it work, although it's pretty sloppy.  But I'm also limited in that I have team members that upload the photographs and would need to upload them into the appropriate sub-album and almost certainly would have to create the sub-album at load time.  Coppermine does not support either.  So I'm back to the godzilla of gallery application code GalleryV2.  I hope you hear the cries on this forum for this vital feature.  I'll come running back in a heartbeat if (hopefully when) this is added.

Thanks for reading.

[MavricK]

I would love sub albums as well. That would be much less confusing then sub catagories.

[Titooy]

I just wanted to bump that request and explain concretely why I'd need that feature. I know it's in your mind but it is not (yet) in the cpgNG code, and it seems to me it's such a big change that I imagine it won't be in that release (I hope I'm wrong).

The way this forum is structured is a good comparison. Let's take the Coppermine category:

↳ Announcements
↳ General discussion (no support!)
↳ Feature requests
↳ Scheduled for cpg1.5.x
↳ Scheduled for cpgNG
↳ Modifications/Add-Ons/Hacks
↳ Admin Functions
↳ Watermarking & image manipulation
↳ CPMFetch
↳ Looking for Freelancers / Paid help


1. visual/"aesthetical" reason
With the current Coppermine structure, Announcements would be an album, thus displayed after the others and in a completely other way. The only solution at the present is to create a category with that only album... which isn't very optimal...

2. Practical reason
Let's take the Modifications/Add-Ons/Hacks board. When that board grown up, there has been a need to create child board. The same applies to a picture collection. For now you need to replace your album by a new category and put your (splitted) album in it.

3. Structural reason
same example as before: some pictures (topics) don't fit in any sub-album (child board), they are more general. In the current cpg, you need to create a "general" album with the pictures who should just stay at the upper level, along the sub-albums.

[Aditya Mooley]

I know it's in your mind but it is not (yet) in the cpgNG code

As far as sub-albums is concerned, the current NG team is not interested in putting this functionality. However, we have put out the complete code for people to see.
So if someone wants to put up a patch feel free to do so.

[digimic]

yes i would be very interested by subalbums because in each Album i have a "video" in order to separate picture and video for the same album.

[Joachim Müller]

You're welcome to hack the code then.

[TwilightRealm]

And Coppermine loses yet again a few more users, including myself now. I can't believe Coppermine is one of three most suggested galleries on the Internet. No, I don't know how to hack the coding, but if I did, I would in an instant to aid the numerous Coppermine users (and users who have been driven away from Coppermine) into making the gallery a better place. It's too bad suggestions and feature requests aren't really taken to heart. It's kind of puzzling why this forum is even here.

[Tranz]

The request in this thread had been accepted and the post marked Valid so I don't understand why you said the feature request wasn't taken to heart. A lot of cool features have come from user feedback. In this case, if the code could be written, it would have been written already.

Also, not all feature requests can be accepted because we have to consider how beneficial they are to the majority of users. As a web app, we need to minimize the size of Coppermine, due to resource, storage and bandwidth considerations. Web apps can't be as bloated as the apps on your computer.

[Joachim Müller]

Sub-albums are hard to accomplish. If this wouldn't be the case, we would have added that feature to coppermine before. It isn't though. You have now cluttered all threads on this forum that deal with sub-albums with your nagging and flaming, so cheers to you! Hope you feel better now. As you're not a coder, you can't tell if it's easy or hard to accomplish, so I suggest you just shut up. We understand that you would have wanted that feature. So do others. So do we. Yet it can't be accomplished by just wanting it. It involves work/time/skills to accomplish this. Being told by a code virgin that our software sucks doesn't even hurt. Farewell.

[TwilightRealm]

As a disclaimer, before anyone attempts to make my post into something more than what it is, I suggest it's read all the way through before posts are given in response. It seems even my earlier one was taken out of context. However, the last post I made last night on another thread I will grant as being a flamer.

Now, if you were taking subalbums into consideration then I take back my words. Despite the thread having been marked valid, the responses in the thread had said by the developers that they saw no need to develop subalbums, and that others were free to try, which sounded unresponsive and apathetic to those who could really use them. I never said it was hard or easy to make subalbums, but I saw no mention of even trying to do subalbums and failing. Yes, it's not the developers duty to do whatever people request, I am aware, because the gallery is their project, and it's their time on the line.

As for making separate topics, I started out with asking if there was something I could do about the mixed categories and albums I had in a category. It was when I searched for a word for the word 'suggestions' that I stumbled on to this thread. Then I remarked in another thread someone had about subalbums. Just because someone gets brief with another they're automatically assumed to be a malicious person who aims to make trouble--I'm not, despite how it may have seemed. I was upset that I have installed and uninstalled several different image galleries, and so far Coppermine came the closest. In some ways it was the easiest and most difficult to customize but I kept at it until finally I was close to how I wanted things, and then when it came to bringing in the other category pictures, I realized that what I had wanted were subalbums (although at the time I didn't think they were called 'sub-albums', I just thought of them as 'albums within albums' (it was late last night when I posted).

As for shutting up, I won't. I speak my opinion, and if it is off, I do apologize for it. I usually try and research more into things but my fuse was short last night, and again, I'm sorry for that. Nagging and flaming are harsh terms but I'll give in to that being as it was.

I never said Coppermine 'sucks', you're reading too much into my words. I said they weren't taking to heart the people's actual suggestions and requests, and that is how it had appeared to me until after this incident it was straight out admitted by GauGau that Coppermine would like the feature as well. I do have some coding knowledge in PHP, ASP.NET, and SQL, but only the basics--if more, I would even offer my help. TranzNDance, I do appreciate your professionalism, although I can't say the same for GauGau. However, that is fine as well, it is easy to get defensive about ones work, I would have done the same.

[Tarique Sani]

@TwilightRealm - OK you never said Coppermine sucks but
#1 you did call the developers lazy!
#2 You have cast doubts on the level of support we manage to give and then
#3 you play the martyr saying your suggestions are not taken to heart by developers

It is only after being ticked off by Gaugau did you come around and apologise - perhaps you now realise what Gaugau's job is on this forum among other things?

So in my book you are still a Troll - if you are not then I would suggest stay around on the forum try to help other users, I just went thru your posts all you have ever done from here is take, for a change give back....

[Abbas Ali]

In the midst of this sub-albums war i would like to point out one thing which i think TwilightRealm missed.

As far as sub-albums is concerned, the current NG team is not interested in putting this functionality.

Note that here Aditya is talking about NG (i.e. Coppermine NG) which is different from coppermine 1.x series. So i think no one denied sub-albums in cpg 1.x. But we should not give up categories in favor of sub-albums. If both can live in 1.x then it will be good.

[Paver]

Following up on Abbas' post, the fact that this thread is marked "Valid" means it's a valid feature request for the 1.x series (which is the current Coppermine series), and if someone - dev or non-dev - contributes the code to implement this request, it will be evaluated for inclusion in the core code.

[TwilightRealm]

It is only after being ticked off by Gaugau did you come around and apologise - perhaps you now realise what Gaugau's job is on this forum among other things?

No, I did not apologize because of GauGau's post, but because the next day I realized what all I had actually posted the night before. The fact that it came after GauGau's post was because that was when I had gotten on the computer and that was already posted there.

sub-albums is concerned, the current NG team

The NG part I had thought was the name of the team for Coppermine in general--again, my mistake.

#3 you play the martyr saying your suggestions are not taken to heart by developers

A martyr? An interesting thought but no.

Following up on Abbas' post, the fact that this thread is marked "Valid" means it's a valid feature request for the 1.x series

It was my assumption (and yes, it's never good to assume) that valid meant it was a valid thread in the forum, as in the others were not actually forum request topics (unrelated). It had not occurred to me that invalid meant -"Can't be done" and invalid "We're thinking about it." I agree that it does make sense but at the time the idea had not occurred to me.

So in my book you are still a Troll

Think what you will, I am no troll. I am aware of how it appears in the forum but my first post was a decent regular post, the next two were upset, the third disappointed (in which I said I planned to look for another gallery) but not a flame, and then the next one apologetic posts. If I were a troll, I would have said some rather rude things in reply to GauGau and the others and then left the forums.

In general I am a nice person, a college student, who does web design as a job on the side for a few clients. We all have our bad days and bad moments, and admittedly the day I posted, I was worn down to the bone on finding an image gallery I could put years of work into, going back to at least 1996, that would actually work. Everytime I thought I'd found the right gallery and began to use it, something came up, and again I'd have to start over. I've been through Gallery, 4images, and then tried several others I found on the Internet, even one whose main language was in what I think was German. There's no excuse, however, what I said was unkind but I have apologized sincerely. You can either believe or don't, that's up to you.

[Siberiantiger]

So will there be a sub-album function in Coppermine Gallery ever?

[Joachim Müller]

Did you read the thread you're replying to? If a dev feels like implementing this feature, then yes. Otherwise no. You'll have to understand the workflow of an open source app - we can't force anything. We have no schedules, fixed release dates, definitive features that will go into a release. We maintain a list of features that would be nice to have in future versions. If a dev feels like coding it, then it will go into the development branch of the code. The only thing we can tell for sure are the features that already exist in the devel branch, there's no saying what will be done next. Sub-albums are hard to accomplish, as the internal structure of the entire code base would have to be changed in many places. It's not that we wouldn't want to have that feature, it's just very hard to do. You're welcome to submit your code contribution if you're a good coder. If you're not: butt out.