Thread

With the size of the EE user base, I find it hard to believe that there aren’t a good number of users still on EE1 who haven’t moved to EE2 because of the Gallery problem.

Possible implementations for an EE2 Gallery have been discussed widely in this forum, including:

best practice for updating EE1 to EE2 when photo gallery has been used.

Question about EE2 - PhotoGallery alternatives

Taking the plunge, EE 1.x to EE 2.x ?

EE2 Photo Gallery Management—Channel Images vs Slideshow Pro Director API ?

Easy Gallery Option?

Add-ons for Export & Import of Gallery?

The general advice seems to be to use a combination of one or more of Channel Images, CE Image, Matrix, Assets etc. However, without purchasing all of these add-ons to perform an evaluation, it’s hard to know what the relative merits are. Perhaps users who have experience of implementing a gallery with these could comment? Or the developers of each could expound on the benefit of their product? Are some solutions more appropriate for certain circumstances - e.g. if a gallery is only to be used in a single entry?

It could be that users are still waiting for EllisLab to announce their gallery migration tool, but Les indicates in the ExpressionEngine 1.x, End of Public Support Announcement that “no timeframe can be made public”, and in ExpressionEngine 2.4.0 Released that “the Gallery import keeps running into issues and [being] pushed back”.

It would be helpful to know what these issues are. Is it a case that a generic gallery import tool is difficult, but that a methodology could be described which could be adapted to work in individual cases?

At a simplistic level, we have definitions of the EE1 galleries stored in 3 relatively simple tables, combined with the image files themselves, stored in their different sizes. Is the complication connected with the definitions, or the image files? With the export or the import? Why would a conventional CSV/XML export and DataGrab not suffice?

Has anyone succeeded in performing their own migration of their EE1 galleries to one of the third party add-ons, and if so could they comment on the problems they encountered? Failing that, is there any advice from the developers or users of one of the above add-ons as to what facilities are provided for performing a batch import - one could then work out how to export the EE1 galleries in the appropriate format.

I’m not concerned about how the galleries are rendered on the front end - there’s no shortage of solutions for that; nor is this an EE vs WordPress debate. The questions are how best to migrate existing images (I have over 9000 in 700 galleries) without having to upload them all manually, and then what is the neatest of the above solutions to allow CP users to add and maintain the galleries.

Thanks in advance,
Brian

Hi Ben,

We understand and appreciate the frustration of our users that are in a holding pattern regarding the Gallery module and ExpressionEngine 2. I can’t provide any further information than what is already publicly available.

I don’t have any experience migrating a Gallery into any of the proposed work-arounds, so I wouldn’t be all that helpful. You might contact some of the developers of the products you mentioned in order to get your questions in front of them as well.

Since you are looking for insight and discussion on the matter, I’m going to move this into the General Discussion forum.

Thanks for your questions and input!

Cheers,

I’ll just add my voice here as well: if anyone has any thoughts on how to accomplish this migration and is willing to provide some input, those of us who are stuck on 1.x due to having Galleries would really appreciate it. 😊

Anyone have best practice or methods re: converting photo gallery from ee 1.x to 2.4.x, this might be a good place to compile it.

Just top of my head, in brief, but one way would be to create a new channel in 2.4.x with appropriate fields, get the fields IDs for all the data from ee1.x. > Export as csv via a template,

Then use datagrab and import into new 2.x channels and match up the fields.

Hi

Following my original post, I’ve recently completed the successful migration of about 800 galleries comprising nearly 10000 original images.

I used Channel Images (which I can recommend), and created a Gallery channel containing just one field, the CI. Creating a new gallery is then straightforward.

Migration of the old ones required about 140 lines of code, which retrieved the details of each old gallery and its constituent images, sizes, descriptions, etc. from the old gallery tables, and copied them into CI and the new channel. It also copied the old main images into the newly created directory for each new gallery (i.e. set of Channel Images).

I could then regenerate thumbnails using CI to create whatever number and sizes of images I needed.

Only small changes to the templates were required to use the new galleries, using channel_images rather than gallery tags, and the new front end works in the same way as the old.

I’m sure there are other add ons you could use for the image handling, but the CI user interface is quite slick and the client is very happy with the result - which is much better than the EE1 gallery interface.

Hope this helps but please PM if you’d like further information.

Brian

Was there any tagging associated with any of the galleries you migrated? I’ve just recently learned that I’ve locked myself into 1.* even more firmly by using Solspace’s Tag module with galleries. The tags associate to the gallery ID and since that changes on a transfer, moving the tags along would perhaps be tricky.

Hi Linda

No, and I can no longer see the Solspace Tag EE1 docs and can’t remember how it works with galleries. However the tag tables contain the links you need so it would be a case of using those to migrate the tags to EE2. It’s not too different to what I had to do, where I had to re-link my weblog entries to use the new gallery - I created the newgallery custom field as a relationship and populated it with the new entry_id.

But it was for reasons such as this that I decided that CSV/DataGrab would not suffice - you need to populate existing entries with the new entry_ids and/or relationships.

BTW I haven’t decided whether to upgrade Solspace Tags to EE2 or to use the free Tagger from DevDemon (authors of CI)... So that might be another migration exercise.

B.

Brian,
Thanks for sharing! Really appreciate it. Good point about the existing weblog entries that would need the custom relationship field.

Was there any tagging associated with any of the galleries you migrated? I’ve just recently learned that I’ve locked myself into 1.* even more firmly by using Solspace’s Tag module with galleries. The tags associate to the gallery ID and since that changes on a transfer, moving the tags along would perhaps be tricky.

Linda, I am in the exact same situation and have circa 30,000 tagged gallery entries. I am exploring all options now as we have to upgrade to EE2.x for various reasons.

My initial thought was to use Matrix and Matrix multi-upload if I could get the Solspace Tag field as a Matrix field type - but after contacting Solspace and offering to pay for this development they said they were unable to do it.

The issue isn’t so much in moving the tagged images, as that’s easy but I want to still have the tagging capability after the move.

I’m open to any suggestions as to how this could be handled. We actually have a budget for development and will probably look at a Kickstarter project for all those stuck in the same boat of not being able to upgrade due to the gallery module.

I just noticed that the latest version of the Importer from Solspace is said to support Tags. So in theory, if the exporting could be handled, that might be a solution?

I just noticed that the latest version of the Importer from Solspace is said to support Tags. So in theory, if the exporting could be handled, that might be a solution?

But how are you going to tag images in EE2 i.e. new images not just ones that have been imported.

If they’re just imported as regular channel entries, surely that won’t be a problem?

If they’re just imported as regular channel entries, surely that won’t be a problem?

Yup, that’ll work.

I have some specific issues with my site, like batch uploading etc… that I need and navigating between entries in a gallery category would be tiresome but this looks like a better starting point on which to build an add-on to address those issues. Thanks for the pointer.

I’ve had suggestions for using the Pixel and Tonic ... Assets module, I think it is? That one seems like it could at least handle the need for a directory structure that matches what Galleries allows. I am not sure if it also does batch.

I asked about the Solspace Importer and Galleries here: http://www.solspace.com/forums/viewthread/12552/

I think it looks like it could be a viable solution. Though I have no clue how to handle the exporting, I don’t know mySQL queries and such things myself.