Hi everybody,

I just purchased the commercial license of EE along with the discussion module. I was very happy with everything (relationship between entries, custom fields, etc), all stuff that WordPress doesn’t offer, which is our current “CMS”.

Now, with WordPress there is this plugin which enables my staff to create, batch upload and manage galleries and albums in a very simple way.

Now that we’re moving everything to EE, I’m trying to figure an easy way me and my staff can do the same task. Just so you understand the magnitude of our need, it’s a videogame website and as you can imagine, we need to handle thousands of screenshots. That’s more than four digits there.

Anyway, by what I have seen so far, the gallery module is rather different to what we are used to using.

For example, I can’t find a way to batch upload screenshots. As far as I know, I have to upload them to the batch folder through FTP, and then go adding them one by one to the database. Asking my staff to do this process everytime we recieve new screenshots from the companies is kind of frustrating.

Apart from that, I’m wondering which is the best solution to manage such a high quantity of screenshots. Imagine something like this or this but running on ExpressionEngine. How should I handle this?

Should I create a new Gallery for each Game title, and update it whenever new screenshots come out? Should I use just weblogs? I’m totally lost here. I need an easy and quick way to handle a large amount of images.

I still haven’t explored the other features like watemarking and stuff, but I’m sure that stuff fits into our needs.

If you’re curious to see the site, here’s the actual version running on WordPress and here’s the new version running on ExpressionEngine. I’ve only got part of the index done by now. Still lots of work to do.

On a side note, I’d like to thank EllisLab for such a wicked CMS, and I really can’t wait to get my hands on v2.0. ^_^

You can consider “gallery” to be the parent while you can use “categories” as children.
Perhaps crate a gallery called screenshots and then use catefgories for each game.
You can just as esialy go with weblogs but imho it is more work - althought you gain more controll such as more custom fields and filtering.
As far as batch-anything I think that gallery concept of batch is actulley pretty decent. You upload all imgs and then add comments and info on each one…if not you can just “next-throught” all the images.
You can also handle your tbumbnails-mid-full size concept with pre-set sizes no matter what the size.
I am still messing with mine and it is far from being public but perhaps you get the idea.
The same amount of entry would be there if you went with weblogs, actually more.
All the best!

lebisol - 16 May 2008 02:32 PM

You can consider “gallery” to be the parent while you can use “categories” as children.
Perhaps crate a gallery called screenshots and then use catefgories for each game.
You can just as esialy go with weblogs but imho it is more work - althought you gain more controll such as more custom fields and filtering.
As far as batch-anything I think that gallery concept of batch is actulley pretty decent. You upload all imgs and then add comments and info on each one…if not you can just “next-throught” all the images.
You can also handle your tbumbnails-mid-full size concept with pre-set sizes no matter what the size.
I am still messing with mine and it is far from being public but perhaps you get the idea.
The same amount of entry would be there if you went with weblogs, actually more.
All the best!

I like what you did with the lightbox effect loading the image template inside.

About the batch thing, what my staff is used to is a Flash interface where they can just select a bunch of screenshots, click Upload and wait until the progress bar finishes. After that, batch-rename all the uploaded screenshots, add alt tags, watermarks, resize… all of this done from the CPanel and dynamicly.

I’ve seen that Easy Gallery module thing that is –or was– under development but the author has vanished. He was adding Flash upload, batch editing and such. Now I’m looking into Gallery Extended 2.1 from SolSpace, but I still think I’m going to need some sort of custom module, and my budget is very limited.

Thanks for the reply by the way. Learn new stuff every day.

Hi Kevin,

I have the same problem you do, I also need to manage a large photo gallery and I’m studying the best way to do it.

Right now I’m convinced that I won’t get all the features I need out of the box and here is what I’m considering doing(or paying for someone to do ):

- batch upload of photos through a java applet, the pictures would be uploaded to the designated batch upload directory, possibly the applet would also take care of the thumbnails;
- new batch upload form, the new thumbnails will be displayed in a box with a checkbox associated to each of them, then using a for each I plan to add each checked photo to the database with the same characteristics (ie: process all the photos of person X at the event Y at the same time).

Does anyone have any opinions about this?

Good luck with your project!

Perhaps you can look in direction of weblogs then along with TinyMCE and/or Ibrowse plugin. This really now goes in direction of file manager vs. gallery manager but it is an option espcially if you want to have a single weblog entry called eg. ‘COD4 Screenshots’ and then throw in all screens into it.
For the ease of use I went with gallery module but my needs are a lot smaller vs. yours.
Remember that you also can relate gallery images to weblogs as well .

Learn new stuff every day.

That makes 2 of us

Uhm. I think I’m going to do some testing with a few screenshots and games, relate them to their respective game and see how everything comes out.

Maybe ExpressionEngine 2.0 offers just what I’m asking for, a dynamic and easy-to-use interface to upload and manage image galleries. But I doubt we’ll get to know until at least two weeks prior to launch.

Kevin:

One route you might want to think about is Flickr.

In other words, store all your images there. There are many batch upload tools, you can arrange your pics in photosets, add captions, etc. Then, grab the data from Flickr and display how you want via EE.

David Rencher, aka Lumis, has written a rockin’ module called eeFlickr that “allows you to pull your photo stream, your photos and sets and more you can sort by date, interestingness tags etc. Basically allowing you to put your Flickr into your ExpressionEngine Templates. eeFlickr will allow your sites visitors to sort browse your Flickr photos however you wish using ExpressionEngines extremely flexible template management system.”

When you’re dealing with zillions of images, they really start eating up space on the server. Why not let Flickr do all the work?

Just an idea!

That’s an interesting idea, but…

That module is still un beta phase and I don’t think I can related images to weblog entries the way I need to.

I’ve purchased the Gallery Extended module from Solspace and even though it’s not a perfect solution, it certainly has achieved half of what I needed.

Kevin Selles - 07 June 2008 03:51 PM

That’s an interesting idea, but…

That module is still un beta phase and I don’t think I can related images to weblog entries the way I need to.

I’ve purchased the Gallery Extended module from Solspace and even though it’s not a perfect solution, it certainly has achieved half of what I needed.

hi there, I’m just wondering where gallery extended is lacking and what are it’s strong points?
I have very similar needs for a news blog. each news containing 1-x images that are tied to the news with thumbnails and pagination for the big image.
are you still happy with that solution or did you find a better one?

cheers
stefan

outline4 - 08 August 2008 03:32 PM

Kevin Selles - 07 June 2008 03:51 PM

That’s an interesting idea, but…

That module is still un beta phase and I don’t think I can related images to weblog entries the way I need to.

I’ve purchased the Gallery Extended module from Solspace and even though it’s not a perfect solution, it certainly has achieved half of what I needed.

hi there, I’m just wondering where gallery extended is lacking and what are it’s strong points?
I have very similar needs for a news blog. each news containing 1-x images that are tied to the news with thumbnails and pagination for the big image.
are you still happy with that solution or did you find a better one?

cheers
stefan

Well, it’s the best solution one can find at the moment since there really isn’t any other choice.

With GX module I simple upload a bunch of images to the batch folder and then from the control panel select all images, enter the ID of the related entry et voila. It’s pretty neat, but not perfect.

You have to really work around for some time to get exactly what you need, but once everything is set up things just get along.

You can check out the GX forum for more info.

http://www.solspace.com/forums/viewforum/11/

I’m just hoping that EE2 extends the funcionality of the Gallery module for a better administration. If you really need to related tons of images to entries, GX module is good enough.

Just ran across this…maybe helps maybe not http://www.masugadesign.com/the-lab/scripts/weegee/

thanks kenny, thanks lebisol

maybe you’d like to have a look at my thread. mark has posted an extensive answer!
http://expressionengine.com/forums/viewthread/87701/

I’ll give the mark huot’s file extention, along with the imgsizer plugin a shot.
next I’ll be defenately trying the weegee module - looks very promising!

I’ll post my experiances here…
greetings
stefan