Thread

Mark, you put manually put the file name into each custom field?

Can you help me understand how I would use a weblog for the following workflow/design?

1) batch upload photos (I am fine with FTP)
2) go through each image and put in a title and caption

Then my gallery would show thumbs (via Image Sizer) and be able to pick up the EXIF data (I can do this already).

Can you show a sample template as I don’t quite understand how you control how many images are on each thumb page. Also, how do you deal with pagination?

Thanks.

Good questions Erin.

I must say that most of these are handled through the Photo Gallery with ease. Thumbnails are generated on the fly and especially for non-computer folks it is much easier to handle. Solspace has a very good SAEF for the Gallery, and also you can set restrictions on the max upload size, which is non-existent in the file-upload(edit: not true, see underneath). I found that the gallery is the best way to let people upload images without making things complicated. Also pagination is no problem.

That said, if you are your own content provider, it might be interesting to use the weblog file-upload, because I had to do some serious thinking to combine gallery entries with regular entries (URL segments got mixed up and conditionals didn’t respond properly). But then there is also Solspace’s Extended Gallery module that allows you to place images wherever you want them.

I think I will give Mark’s option a try to compare things for myself. Again if you make it for your mother, the regular file upload sequence is a serious drawback whereas the Photo gallery SAEF from Solspace does a better job.

..., and also you can set restrictions on the max upload size, which is non-existent in the file-upload.

Not strictly true

Admin ›  Weblog Administration ›  File Upload Preferences will let you set max file size for the Standard file uploader.

I agree with you on pretty much every other point. What EE needs badly is a file manager including a customisable uploader. If I had the code-writing chops, I would give it a go myself, but alas I have to pass it on to someone who knows what they’re doing.

Oops, you’re right, it’s the other way around: the gallery doesn’t have a max file size restriction setting! So that’s another drawback for the gallery.

I do have a warning in the SAEF page explaining to not use images bigger then 1000 pixels wide, but many people do not read these things. I get regular mails from members that get the white page as a result of the PHP buffer overload.

But a similar easy image upload and automatic thumbnail that can be addresses as {thumb-image} or {full-image} would be nice.

Mark, you put manually put the file name into each custom field?

Can you help me understand how I would use a weblog for the following workflow/design?

1) batch upload photos (I am fine with FTP)
2) go through each image and put in a title and caption

Then my gallery would show thumbs (via Image Sizer) and be able to pick up the EXIF data (I can do this already).

Can you show a sample template as I don’t quite understand how you control how many images are on each thumb page. Also, how do you deal with pagination?

Thanks.

Hi Erin,

Well number one you say you are fine with so I don’t think any details need to go there. Actually the way that I do is has it all handled for me. I use a form created by Freeform which posts to a moblog creating a closed status entry in the weblog.

This achieves two things :

1 - All the text for the image item is automatically placed into the correct fields for me in the entry, and

2 - The file gets uploaded to the correct folder via Freeform for me.

So basically all the end user does is goes to a SAEF, chooses the photo they want to upload and then fills in a few fields in the form for things such as title, description, tags etc and then when the form is submitted the image is uploaded to the correct folder and all the textual data is sent off to the moblog ready for me to receive.

I then have a very very simple admin page that I have created which first of all checks the moblog for new entries and this in effect puts the information from the e-mail into a weblog entry, I can then view each of these entries on a page and view the image so I can check that the quality is good enough for inclusion to the site. Also on this page I have a couple of links whereby if I don’t like an image or don’t want it on the site for whatever reason then I can both delete the entry from here and also delete the file on the server.

Once I have approved / (disapproved / deleted) all the entries then I can go into the backend of EE and change all the closed status entries to open.
I also do this in conjunction with my Maximum Posts Reached plugin so that photographers can only upload so many images at a time so I don’t get too bogged down with entries and get confused when allowing them into the system.

As to the question about how I show images per page this is a very difficult one for me to show a template for as in the site I am creating I am using a lot of extra modules and plugins such as the Tag module and to just rip a template down to the bare essentials would unfortunately take me quite a while and at the moment I am unfortunately bogged down with work. Sufficed to say though all I am really doing in its simplest form is using a weblog tag to bring back the entries and spit out the image and title on a page. The rest is all handled with CSS. The pagination and how many images per page are just handled in the usual way using the pagination links and the limit parameter on the weblog tag.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark

[Disclaimer] - I do not believe that my method is the best by any means and it is entirely up to the individual as to which method they use but for me using the Gallery Module just doesn’t have enough power or functionality. Whilst it has some nice features such as batch upload I really do believe that using a weblog module opens you up to a whole heap of more power and functionality at your finger tips but this is as said just above totally my belief and totally down to the individual. What might be great for me, might not be great for the next person 😉

Sounds good Mark, I’ll definitly give it some thought!

Hiya,

Hope it all works out for you. Me personally I did all of this in exceptionally bare templates with just the SAEF / weblog tags until I had it all working the way I needed. Didn’t want to get bogged down in display code until it was all working correctly.

Best wishes,

Mark

Thanks Mark!

No problems.

I will probably write all of this up when I get my site all finished that I am working on at the moment as I think that it will probably help a lot of people out in the future. Watch this space 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

I’ve made a portfolio page in the style of Slideshow pro fully based on the Photo Gallery. The thumbnails, full images and pagination are addressed through the Gallery tags.

I have a quick question.  I noticed that your thumbnails are all of equal dimensions even though your images are not.  How were you able to accomplish this?

Image Sizer plugin or phpThumb with do that for you.

^^ Yep, image sizer works well. Or, you can even do it with the build in functionality of EE when you upload an image in the publish page. You can upload and image and then create a thumbnail of equal height and width. Although this does create the need for an extra custom field (one for the full size image and one for the thumb). The image sizer plugin only needs one image and it does the rest.

I have a quick question.  I noticed that your thumbnails are all of equal dimensions even though your images are not.  How were you able to accomplish this?

I did this way easier. The photo’s are placed in a rectangular box with the property

overflow:hidden

the width is equal to the set height of the image in the Gallery

The only point was that the image was placed against the left border of the box. To center the image I used a little bit of PHP, The example is for abox 64px x 64 px.

{thumb_url}

As you can see the left margin is the negative half of the width -32. If an image is 100 px wide, the margin wil be -(50-32) or -18px.

Now that’s just naughty!! 😉

Actually have done this a few times myself in the past when nothing else will work.

Best wishes,

Mark

Well it’s one of the things I am missing inthe regular image upload. I can use the thumb tags to create such a script. In the other case I need to create custom fields and take care that the right images are placed in the appropiate fields.

The image sizer plugin only needs one image and it does the rest.

Does the image sizer plugin create an EE tag?