Help with customization

[ern4n]

I'm using Coppermine in something of a unique way and would like to request some assistance in customizing the way it works and looks.  These also might prove to be features to add to future versions.

I work for a non-profit medical journal and we've just brought the hosting duties in-house (site: www.thejns-net.org).  The way I am going to use Coppermine is as the image gallery for all the articles.  Each Journal will be its own category with each volume as a sub-category.  Every article will have its own album.  See (Be forewarned -- graphic images):
http://www.thejns-net.org/shared/coppermine/

Only I (or whoever is the web person) will be adding images.

The customized features that I would like are:
1 - Since I am using the Batch Add function to add to albums, once I have added the images to an album I would like to be able to lock or close that album so that it doesn't appear on the pull-down menu in the batch add process.  This will eliminate my having to scroll through dozens (eventually hundreds) of albums.

Would it be possible for me to add a field "closed" to the albums table and add some query into the php to only put non-closed albums into the pull-down menu?  I'm still pretty inexperienced with php so I didn't want to muck about too much.

2 - In viewing the albums, there is the option of displaying or not displaying the description for the images.  I want to show the descriptions, but some of them get very long:
http://www.thejns-net.org/shared/coppermine/thumbnails.php?album=44
What would be ideal would be to have the option to show the description but limit what is shown to a specified limit (100 or 200 characters, or whatever).  Any suggestions on coding this in?

Thanks for your help on this!

[Casper]

There is a mod available to make the album description boxes scrollable, to maintain a certain size, please search the mods board.

In the next version, it is planned that the batch add will only show first leve categories, similar to the tree structure used by windoze.  So it will be much easier to navigate in galleries with many cats and sub-cats.