Things that need to be added for CM to be a mature product

[tooluser]

Enormously more well written than Menalto Gallery - and unfortunately, not usable yet! I'm going crazy, because I so wanted to stop using Gallery. But:

- AFAICT, there's no means of accessing an individual photo with a simple album-imagename based URL. Am I missing something?
- The rotate function doesn't work reliably (at all?)
- There should *never* be a loss of JPEG quality.
- The notion of albums-in-categories is nowhere near as useful as categories-within-albums.

If I had a 'travel' album, I could have nested categories within in. Instead, I have a travel category, with all my countries/cities. . . each with an album. If I decide to split one country up into two sub-categories, I have to recreate albums. There's not even an easy way to move them around, which would be a partial fix to this organizational problem.

[Joachim Müller]

- AFAICT, there's no means of accessing an individual photo with a simple album-imagename based URL. Am I missing something?

Yes, you're missing something, toggle pic info and see the url given at the bottom

- The rotate function doesn't work reliably (at all?)

Rotate will be in cpg1.3.0 (which is still under beta stage). There's a lengthy thread on the cpg1.3.0testing/bugs board about it. Generally speaking: rotate will only be there if the image library you use has support for it.

- There should *never* be a loss of JPEG quality.

Lossless means bigger files - you can set compression/quality in coppermine config - change quality to 100%, which means lossless. There's no way around this, it lies in the nature of the JPEG file format, so your request is (to say it mildly) "invalid".

- The notion of albums-in-categories is nowhere near as useful as categories-within-albums.

For future versions we're considering to have only albums, which will be able to contain both files and sub-albums. Imo your request basically is just a matter of terminology though.

GauGau

[tooluser]

- AFAICT, there's no means of accessing an individual photo with a simple album-imagename based URL. Am I missing something?

Yes, you're missing something, toggle pic info and see the url given at the bottom

I have it on - and the URL I see isn't "a simple album-imagename based URL". The one I see shows a cgi-based URL with a simple index (apparently through every image in the gallery? EG http://localhost/~joshua/coppermine//displayimage.php?pos=-5 ) I mean something like (IMO, the best thing about Gallery) /coppermine/albumname/imagename, without arguments passed cgi-fashion in the URL (which limits usage).

- The rotate function doesn't work reliably (at all?)

Rotate will be in cpg1.3.0 (which is still under beta stage). There's a lengthy thread on the cpg1.3.0testing/bugs board about it. Generally speaking: rotate will only be there if the image library you use has support for it.

- There should *never* be a loss of JPEG quality.

Lossless means bigger files - you can set compression/quality in coppermine config - change quality to 100%, which means lossless. There's no way around this, it lies in the nature of the JPEG file format, so your request is (to say it mildly) "invalid".

As a photographer, I don't mind larger files if it means my images look decent. Disk is cheap.
I don't quite see what's mild (or non-mild) about that, or in fact what your 'mild' comment means at all! Or "why" there are "quotes" around "invalid"!
But the fact is, you're mistaken; lossless rotation is part of the JPEG standard. GD supports it, I believe. But perhaps there was some confusion there; I didn't mean JPEG compression shouldn't be supported, only that lossless rotation should be. Apologies if I was being muddy.
Oh - and due to peculiarities in the JPEG2000 spec, 100% lossless doesn't always mean lossless, which I consider very tacky, but what can you do?

- The notion of albums-in-categories is nowhere near as useful as categories-within-albums.

For future versions we're considering to have only albums, which will be able to contain both files and sub-albums. Imo your request basically is just a matter of terminology though.

That would be great. Because there is actually quite a utility difference. If it was just terminology, I wouldn't care.
If you could put photos into a category, there would be no difference but terminology. But since you can't, and albums can be leaf-node-only, there's quite a utility difference.
Especially without the ability to readily move photos; If a user creates a nice tree of categories, as I described, they can't later split up an album into further categories without jumping through hoops. I'd applaud a move to simply nested albums - perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see anything gained by the album/category distinction, except a restriction on what the user can do!

Thanks again for a great alternative to Menalto. I can't wait to use something whose code doesn't make me want to run and hide.

[tooluser]

Oh - and to be clear, I didn't mean to suggest that this was anything other than a great piece of software. I think my enthusiasm at being able to drop Menalto Gallery came barreling through in my comments. I also didn't realize (due to the post-1.0-version-number) that this gallery was still in development to the degree it was. I am examining the latest beta, btw.

Thanks again -

[GGallery]

- AFAICT, there's no means of accessing an individual photo with a simple album-imagename based URL. Am I missing something?
Yes, you're missing something, toggle pic info and see the url given at the bottom

what he means would be:
http://mygallery.com/username/albumname/image_filename.html
==> showing dislayimage.php?pos=-123

that can somehow be constructed with the rewrite engine and adding some functionality to displayimage.php
(username/albumname/image_filename => pid)
at least that's how some mods for phpbb do it to make boards more "search engine friendly"

I have a big problem with these "relative in time" pos URLs, too - to be honest I think that's a major mistake in the concept of CPG itself since it's not really "natural" / usual to say to a webserver "give me the most recent document #4" (which might alrady be #5 or #6 after seeing and then finally clicking on it) - and people DO copy&paste urls without thinking/knowing what "pos=" exactly means.

I am working on something I mentioned above (I have no clue at this point if I'll succeed... any hints would be welcome)

[Tarique Sani]

I have a big problem with these "relative in time" pos URLs, too - to be honest I think that's a major mistake in the concept of CPG itself since it's not really "natural" /usual to say to a webserver "give me the most recent document #4"

It may be your opinion BUT it is definitely not a mistake Last Uploads - means what it says.

BTW we are now all waiting to see some code from you!

[pootle]

I want to vote big style for doing away with categories and just having a hierarchy of albums, where an album can contain both photos and more albums.  This is so much more flexible, and also if done right should make it simpler to use and navigate the system.

[Tarique Sani]

next version will have sub-albums and categories - you will be able to take your pick

[tooluser]

I have a big problem with these "relative in time" pos URLs, too - to be honest I think that's a major mistake in the concept of CPG itself since it's not really "natural" /usual to say to a webserver "give me the most recent document #4"

It may be your opinion BUT it is definitely not a mistake Last Uploads - means what it says.

BTW we are now all waiting to see some code from you!

Really tired of the combative responses from the maintainers. Yes, 'Last Uploads" _does_ mean what it says. But as the sole mechanism for random-access, it doesn't work. That is what's being discussed; knock it off with the straw men. This is a legitimate critique, and a useful one that'll make the product much better. It's clearly desirable. So why be aggressive about it? Unless there is another means of direct random access that I'm too dumb to see - I wouldn't doubt it.

Can't wait to see the nested albums.

I, too, would like to see your random-access code. Really, it should be easy-ish to create a php file that parses the rest of its URL as arguments, and just grab album-name and image-name out of it. Oh, and user-name, as you suggested. Could I beg you to email me your diffs? joshua at a place called nowhereville dot org?
Thanks!

Looking forward to CM's next release.