Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

lohan · 2007-10-12 10:44:33

Hi,
I’m very new to Textpattern but already highly impressed with the flexibility it offers. I’m attempting to move my current art website to Texpattern. Most of my web pages have images. Paintings, drawings, digital art etc, I have seperate sections for these types.

I need to hear from experienced users about the best option for me, what is your recommendation for displaying images:

is it
<b>1) installing a separate gallery tool (gallery or plogger) and integrating it with Textpattern</b>
or

<b>2)using a gallery plug in from inside textpattern, (such as http://textpattern.org/category/galleries)</b>

I have no experience in any of the above because so far I had a MS Frontpage website.

Thank you very much

lozmatic · 2007-10-12 11:10:49

Much depends on how you want your galleries to look and behave.

I’m building a site for a photographer at the moment and are using a number of plugins to achieve something quite simple: a single page per photo with thumbnails to navigate a set (and sets categorized in sections such as ‘weddings’, ‘corporate’, etc…).

This is how a set is going to look and work: http://raymond.kw-wu.com/weddings/michelle-james/1/

I haven’t tried photo gallery plugins but there is one called wow_gallery which is supposed to be good, offering many more editing options for each image (eg. 3 thumbnails).

jstubbs · 2007-10-12 17:38:13

Very nice lozmatic. Care to share your method for building this nice gallery?

jakob · 2007-10-12 17:48:40

I guess there are many ways of going about it but I would say it depends how much the gallery has to actively mesh with the rest of the site and the functionality you require. IMHO, txp’s image upload is not particularly streamlined and uploading large quantities of images rapidly becomes boring.

So, if you:

need to use the pictures regularly at particular sizes elsewhere in the site, or
if you need to incorporate other functionality with your images, e.g. you want to include lots of other information with your photos, or have people comment on them, or sell your images, or have specific organisational needs, such as images assigned to galleries and to categories at the same time …

…then use txp or similar to organise them.

If on the other hand:

you just want a gallery with albums (call them categories if you prefer), thumbnails and larger versions that is to all intents and purposes self-sufficient, then go with a gallery script. Some gallery scripts do more than others, some act as photoblogs, others have locked areas etc. I personally like using the low-overhead photostack which where necessary I then style to look like the rest of the site as it has a templating system. It handles batch upload, you can ftp your pictures in folders and it creates thumbs and preview images on the fly so uploading large amounts of images is a whole lot easier than with txp. It sits happily alongside txp, but the admin areas are not interlinked.

If you decide to use txp, there are two main approaches, images assigned to categories and images then displayed per category, or an image per article, e.g. for photoblog-style sites. There was a thread with an overview of gallery plug-ins a while back, tho’ it is no longer up-to-date I think. You should also check textpattern resources galleries list.

lohan · 2007-10-13 04:41:05

Thanks very much for all the links and tips. Nice site lozmatic!

Jakob, photostack looks very nice but I don’t have the coding skills to style it to make it look like the rest of my site. By the way, isn’t it possible to do batch uploads or FTP with any of Textpattern plugins?

P.S>
This is my current MS Frontpage site http://www.lohangunaweera.tk/ I needed to make the move to Textpattern mainly because i was getting lot of spam through the MS Frontpage guestbook and contact form. This site has static galleries for each section, images are not repeated or used outside the gallery.

Last edited by lohan (2007-10-13 04:42:33)

masa · 2007-10-13 05:05:21

lohan wrote:

By the way, isn’t it possible to do batch uploads or FTP with any of Textpattern plugins?

Most are probably twiddling their thumbs waiting for ebl_batchupload to be released – I do have an earlier version which works perfectly.

The thing is that somewhere around the 400–500-images mark administering your collection will become rather tedious. Txp’s image management could use some improvement.

lohan · 2007-10-13 05:22:34

Thanks Martin! I think that’s what suits me better :-) because I prefer doing things from inside Textpattern rather than messing around with another totally new tool such as gallery/plogger etc.

But ebl_batchupload is not a free plug in or is it?

masa · 2007-10-13 05:43:17

No, it’ll be 15 $ per domain, but it’s well worth it. It does optional resizing, thumb generation and creation of new categories on the fly.

mem_multifile_upload has been suggested as an alternative, but I have never tried it.

Gocom · 2007-10-13 06:26:09

mem_multifile_upload is only for files, not for images ;)

Cheers!

Last edited by Gocom (2007-10-13 06:26:38)

masa · 2007-10-13 06:44:18

… which is precisely why I don’t use it, but some people don’t seem to mind

lohan · 2007-10-13 06:59:52

Hey, i just found out that wow_gallery allows FTP uploading :-) Cheers!

Last edited by lohan (2007-10-13 07:04:29)

lohan · 2007-10-13 10:07:46

Nope! sorry it didn’t work for me. it looks so complicated

marios · 2007-10-13 10:35:42

Wow_gallery has an entirely different and unique approach ( albeit an interesting one )

This has several advantages and disadvantages.

The main point is, that it stores the image files themselves inside the database and not in a folder.
The advantage is, that you don’t have to worry about hotlinking ( img file URL directly accessible from the browser ), which would otherwise only be achievable with a Server Side script, or a PHP based solution.

The disadvantage is, that it’s hard to handle and backup such a fat database.

I haven’t looked at the Developer’s updates, so I couldn’t say if it works on 4.0.5.

AFAIK, a Year ago , when looked at the different gallery scripts, I didn’t see any yet, which has hot-link prevention build in, which I’d like to have.

regards, marios

Last edited by marios (2007-10-13 10:37:30)

lohan · 2007-10-13 10:56:32

Marios, thank you very much for explaining :~~) wow I’m beginning to realize that there’s a long way for me to go before even imagining my website on Textpattern ;~~) Anyway, I’ll keep following the forum and try to learn. I was highly impressed with the flexible nature of sections and categories. But when it comes to images(the main feature of my site) I’m in the blue.

jakob · 2007-10-13 17:18:13

lohan, ftp and batch upload is really only a serious issue if you update your site in batches – if you only add individual pictures from time to time, as I imagine is more likely with artwork than say with photography, then it may not make a big difference once you have set up your site.

Sure, it would make life easier when setting up your site the first time around too, but in the time it takes to find a special ftp/batch solution you may find it is quicker, if a little tedious, to upload them one by one.

btw, the photostack templates look more code-laden than they really are. In actual fact they use a principle not unlike txp’s page templates and tags, just instead of preceding the tags with <txp:tag-name and ending with >, they start with <?php echo $ps->tag-name and end with ; ?>. The rest is all normal HTML just like with txp’s page templates and forms. The example templates that come with it cover a variety of typical situations too. The ps->tag-names are listed here and the page template is described there too.

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#1 2007-10-12 10:44:33

Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#2 2007-10-12 11:10:49

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#3 2007-10-12 17:38:13

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#4 2007-10-12 17:48:40

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#5 2007-10-13 04:41:05

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#6 2007-10-13 05:05:21

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#7 2007-10-13 05:22:34

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#8 2007-10-13 05:43:17

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#9 2007-10-13 06:26:09

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#10 2007-10-13 06:44:18

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#11 2007-10-13 06:59:52

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#12 2007-10-13 10:07:46

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#13 2007-10-13 10:35:42

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#14 2007-10-13 10:56:32

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

#15 2007-10-13 17:18:13

Re: Using a seperate gallery tool vs a plugin?

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