OK - I have to say that I am completly fed up with this whole photo gallery thing.
I had it lucky when I actually managed to integrate the StopDesign template into my MovableType based version of http://www.steady-as-she-goes.com. Now things are just so much more complicated.
After finally getting Gallery2 installed and running I can’t seem to figure out what to do with it. I wanted simple, clean and easy and Gallery2 certainly isn’t any of that especially if you want to adjust things. I mean really, what is an Image Block? A Sidebar Block? I go to change the theme and now somehow I’m stuck on the default theme (Matrix - which is ugly as sin) with no way to get rid of it - no links present themselves even though other themes are activated. Maybe I turn it off on a different page?
So there are millions of pages of options and the Help Wiki isn’t so helpful. I don’t really like this Codex documentation methods that people seem to be moving towards because it’s so hard to navigate back and forth and to figure out what you’ve already looked at and what the next steps are.
I admire all the work that goes into these Gallery Plug-Ins - they are an attempt to keep control over your own site rather than just dump links to Google Web Albums or Flickr into your site, but integration to existing blogs seems near impossible if you don’t have a PhD in Web Development (ie - programming).
Anyway, if you can’t tell, I’m annoyed. No one album has it all. And then there is the problem really, what is “it all”?
My dream list for a photo gallery for integration into Wordpress or MovableType:
- Clean layout - that can be integrated into you existing blog. All these plugins have all sorts of bells and whistles that look like crap when integrated into the design of your blog. Either they cannot be integrated easily which means that the photo gallery has a completely different look than the rest of your blog or they just have ugly themes without much documentation on how to change. I suppose a book on CSS and html would help, but that just seems like soooo much work.
- I want something almost exactly like the StopDesign templates
- A page with the Galleries or Albums
- Click on an album and you get a sample photo and a description
- Click to view the album (gallery) and you get thumbnails and the description again (ok - this and the above could be on one page)
- Click a photo and you are in the gallery - next and back functions, pretty (although I could go with cleaner), description (brought in from Picasa), comments. Maybe a few other things like number of times viewed etc.
- Ability to import associated photo descriptions. Right now there are three ways. 1) No descriptions, 2) use an xml or html formatted template to import into your blog, 3) Read data from EXIF. But number three seems impossible to find. Also, not many photo organization packages seem to have the ability to write the descripiton to the EXIF. I tested this process in RoboGeo (my all around favorite photo photo geocoding program) but have no way to look at the EXIF created (yet another research project) and don’t know how to take that info and shove it into something like ZenPhoto anyway
- Album associated GoogleMap based on geo-tags. Honestly, I don’t know where this would fit on a photo gallery page, but it can somewhere, I swear. Maybe it’s something like look at the photos in a gallery format or look at the photos on a map (only the geocoded ones). So maybe you have two different types of gallerys - one for geocoded images and one for non-geocoded images. Yeah, that would work.
- Easy to sort photos. Ideally, they are in the sort order as exported from Picasa2, but other options would be sort by shooting date or file name. I use shot data myself, and sometimes rearrange things if they make more sense in a different order.
Oh I wish I had the patience for programming, but it seems that I like the thought process rather than the programming. I never was very good at programming: Basic, Fortran, Matlab, C then I gave up - couldn’t afford the compliers back then and sucked at it anyway. Now I’m having to actually delve back into this stuff just so I can figure out how to set up a weblog that doens’t look exactaly like all the others. I suppose the puzzle solving is a lot of fun - it’s just that no one really ever knows just what you went through to make a site.
