Category/Album setup question

[spidersilk]

Hello,

A little while back I installed Coppermine on a site I'm creating for a client (www.metricmonsters.com/gallery). I found the category/album structure somewhat confusing, but did my best to set up the structure the client wanted, which was fairly simple. Four main categories, called Metric Bike Gallery (it's a community site for metric motorcycle riders), Current Projects, For Sale, and Other Photos, no user galleries. All images to be uploaded to one of those four categories

The client had previously put out a call for image submissions on a few discussion forums, and received a lot of submissions. After I showed him how to create albums, he went ahead and created albums in the categories I'd set up for all the submitted photos. Over 100 in the main Metric Bike Gallery, smaller numbers in the others. So far, everything seemed OK.

However, now that the site is due to go live, I was going over the gallery setup and realized we have a problem. Based on reading other questions posted in this forum, I've now realized that users can't upload into categories. At all. They can only upload either into the user galleries, which we aren't using, since the client wants all pics to be categorized under one of the four main galleries, or into specific albums in one of the main galleries. Right now, every user's pics are in a separate album in each of the categories, but people aren't going to be able to upload that way, at least as far as I understand it.

So, the question is, what to do so that users can upload into four main areas (only), and the site will also have a reasonably sensible and comprehensible structure that's easy to maintain? Neither the client nor most of the end users of this site are all that computer literate, so I need to keep things simple for them.

I guess the simplest solution would be just one category, and four albums within it, and registered users given permission to upload to each of the four. But I have to wonder -- won't that make it hard for people to navigate, if all the photos from all the users are jumbled in together like that, and there are (eventually) hundreds or thousands or photos in each album? If someone uploads four different images of his bike from different angles, or at different points in a project's progress, wouldn't it make more sense for those to be able to be grouped together somehow, rather than being piled into one huge album with hundreds of other unrelated images? The current structure of individual user albums within each category really makes the most sense to me, but not of no one can upload anything that way.

I suppose another option would be enabling user galleries and allowing people to upload there, then having the admin move the albums into the appropriate categories once they've been uploaded. But that would require a lot of work, and according to one of the other threads here, can only be done with phpMyAdmin, which I'm comfortable with, but my client probably wouldn't be.

The third option would be to keep things as they are now, and disable uploading completely, and have people submit photos by e-mail as they've done to date, while my client creates the albums and uploads the photos. The client actually suggested this at one point, just as a way of maintaining control over what's posted, but it seems like it would be an insane amount of work for him, particularly if the site becomes very popular.

So I'm kind of at a loss for what to do. The first option is the only one, as far as I can see, that would allow the gallery to be pretty much self-sustaining the way it's supposed to be. But it would result in a jumbled and awkward-to-use gallery structure, with thousands of photos thrown indiscriminately into a small handful of mega-galleries. The other two would make the site more usable from a user's perspective, but create tons of unnecessary work for the admin.

Is there <i>any</i> way to use Coppermine to create a reasonably simple, easy-to-use, community photo gallery, that's capable of grouping the photos into sensible categories and keeping a large number of images organized? I don't mind hacking the PHP if I need to, but I just don't know where to start. Or should I just be looking for a completely different gallery script?

*sigh* Yes, I know this is my own fault for not understanding the gallery structure as well as I thought I did when I set it up. But knowing that doeen't help me now...

Any replies would be appreciated. I know it's in the middle of the holidays, but I'm hoping someone may still be around...


Lynna

[Casper]

No, I don't think there's a real problem.  The users can be given permission to upload into all the albums.  They cannot create new albums, but can upload to any existing album, providing the album permissions are set correctly.
If the admin is worried about people uploading into the wrong albums, or someone elses album, just turn on approval required for upload to public albums.  Then the admin can check the pics are being added to the correct albums.

[spidersilk]

The problem with that is that there's no way for anyone other than the users who already submitted pics by e-mail to create albums, so the admin would have to manually create a new album for every new person who wants to upload pics, and that seems like a big headache. And everyone can access everyone else's album.

I'm wondering if maybe the only solution (short of dumping all pics into four huge albums) is what modi posted about in http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=12964.0 -- enable user galleries, let the users create albums there, and then move either the albums (via phpMyAdmin), or, slower yet, the pictures, into the categories they're supposed to be in. But that's also a big headache.

Either of the above would make administering the gallery a full-time job. But the only other option is the four mega-albums, which would make it next to impossible for anyone browing the gallery to find anything. If you knew, for example, that someone was selling a bike, you might have to browse through 40 pages of images to find the right one, rather than just being able to go to that person's album in the "For Sale" category.

The way it's designed just seems really counterintuitive to me -- you can create categories, but then there's no way for users to upload into them except maybe into a few select albums; or you can have users create their own albums in their own galleries, but then there's no way to organize them so that you could quickly see, for example, all pics of items for sale. Someone looking for a particular type of image would just have to blunder around blindly through the user galleries hoping to come across what they were looking for eventually in someone's user gallery...

Though I suppose one option that would be slightly less painful than the others outlined would be to have one "Uploads" album in each category that all registered users could upload to, and then the admin could periodically go through and move pics from it into other albums. Not ideal, but maybe workable.

But do you know if there are any plans to improve the structure in future versions, so that users could upload directly into appropriate categories where people could find what they were looking for?