Gallery 2.2 Roadmap

Now that the 2.1 release is safely out the door and we've completed migrating to Subversion, it's time to get serious about the 2.2 release. Several of the developers met a couple of weeks back and created a Gallery 2.2 Roadmap. We'd like to use this release to address some of the issues that users have raised with Gallery, while still getting it into your hands as soon as possible. This means that we've chosen some key aspects of the product to focus on, and have specifically chosen not to focus on other parts. This doesn't mean that we don't care about them, it just means that we have to prioritize how we spend our resources. Things that are not picked up in this release will have a higher priority in the next one. Take a look and tell us what you think!

Gallery is such a great product already it is hard to imagine that can still improve on it. The road to Gallery 2.2 look bright and promising. I cannot wait to try it out. I do have one question... Why MSSQL??? MySQL works great and it is easy to work with, why would you want to complicate this by bringing in Microsoft. Of course, that is just my opinion. You mentioned that the team will not be working on stability... Why work on an already stable platform? Well, I don't know about the rest of the world but I am looking forward to another fantastic release of Galley.

Love the planned tagging and bulk watermarking. It'll make for a great product - far better than most, if not all, other commercial and OSS competitors in the market! :)

Looks very promising - after having already the first look with the 2.2-cvs, it makes fun to be able to test this next milestone,
Thanks to the Team,
Lutz

Gallery version = 2.2-cvs core 1.1.4
PHP version = 5.1.4 apache2handler
Webserver = Apache/2.2.2 (Win32) DAV/2 PHP/5.1.4 mod_ssl/2.2.2 OpenSSL/0.9.8b
Database = mysql 5.0.18-nt-log,
Theme=PGtheme,
Gallery-URL=http://lf-photodesign.de

bharat's picture
quilldj wrote:
Why MSSQL??? MySQL works great and it is easy to work with, why would you want to complicate this by bringing in Microsoft.

:-) There have been some requests for it, and we have a guy who's willing to work on it so we're happy to extend our reach to another database platform.

As for stability, we are going to continue work on it but it won't be our top priority in this release. We'll make it a higher priority in the next release (if we have stability issues, that is).

Yeah looks very promising! Lets all follow the roadmap to a superb release! Just wanna say, keep it up guys! Doing a very fine job!

scaturan's picture

yep, looking forward to the future improvements myself! thank you!

"Autorotate based on EXIF data User:Joe7"

thank you, Joe7 :)
this has been a quite long-standing mising feature that was avilable in g1 and still has not made it into g2.

ps. why can't i disable those awful emoticons ? ;)

All this focus on making what's already there better is a bold move - it's tough to resist the urge to keep adding on new features and not revisit areas where feedback has asked for improvements to existing capabilities.

On that note, has there been thought given to making something pretty key to what gallery is all about - the images - better in the form of improved color management tagging? I note if I upload a full-size image that has the correct EXIF tags to indicate the file's color profile is sRGB, it looks good in all modern browsers - when I view the full-size image. All the resized versions of it - thumbnails, previews, slideshow, etc - all look much worse since those EXIF flags weren't carried through the operations doing the resizing. The mechanics of this should be straightforward, and there are a number of places it would need to be handled since there are quite a few places where resizing and other image transformations take place.

Has anyone said they would like to take this on? I would be more than willing to help from the color and EXIF side if I could work along with someone more familiar with working inside gallery itself.

Sounds good, and sounds like a great development plan.

I sure would like to see sqlite support, though. This'd help a lot of us move from Gallery 1.

pawliger

You've been participating in the color management discussion we had in http://gallery.menalto.com/node/40199 .
The use case for proper color management is there but it's not like 90% of our users are screaming to get it. They don't even know what that is and they don't see what is wrong right now.

Yes, we need proper color management. But it's not of higher importance for most of our users than better usability or other tasks that are on the roadmap for 2.2.

Yes, Gallery needs to be very solid when it comes to its core features. But when it comes to what we currently should be working on, we always should ask ourselves what improvement / new feature most of our users are currently asking for. If we end up having 1001 features but an unstable and unreliable core product, users will abandon Gallery / scream for better stability / reliability. At this point (or hopefully earler), our top priority would be to improve the core stability.

Having said that I am more than willing to guide you or anyone else to improve G2 in other areas. We welcome user contributions and try to support them as good as possible. If you don't see your top priority task on the roadmap and are willing to code it yourself, let's talk in #gallery on irc.freenode.net or in the forums. :)

Yes, that old color management discussion did happen, and that's not what I'm referring to here. This would be totally automatic and would use existing information in digital camera files to do its work. No user intervention or understanding required, and the result would be better looking images on-screen. Simple as that. I don't have IM access most of the time - what forums are best to discuss this?

The g2 development forum is a good place to discuss such matters.
http://gallery.menalto.com/forum/50

A simple Upload for Users is needed.

As I run a big gallery I have some people sending me pictures. So what I would need is a really simple interface for those people not involved in gallery handling.

They just have to get an interface that let's them upload to specific directorys the admin allows. Then they only can enter the title of the album (with a configurable description text how this should look like) and upload all files or a zip.
Gallery then does the rest, bulk watermarking, rotating .... After this the user can view all pictures and has the ability to delete or change pics.

scaturan's picture

afaik, G2 already supports more than 5 methods to add pictures, and I can't think of a many other "simple ways" for users to add items, unless you're referring to XMLRPC. this looks like a good forum discussion. start one so we can expand it. :)

bharat wrote:

As for stability, we are going to continue work on it but it won't be our top priority in this release. We'll make it a higher priority in the next release (if we have stability issues, that is).

Analogy - "We now have nifty electric doorhandles but the car may crash more often. Don't worry - we will attend to that next year..."

I don't think so.

Production = Stable in most operations that I am familiar with.

It is not right to make stability a matter of explicit priority in production releases. Stability is a more pure quality issue and therefore cannot be treated in the same way as new feature availability.

Any production release that is less stable than the previous production release is not a production release. It might be a beta feature release but not a production release.

If you de-emphasize stability, the release will have stability issues.

So, you would place the availability of a new feature ahead of whether the product stays operational? There is no new feature so urgent that I would consider installing it at the risk of an unreliable system.

Example bad issue: If you have to release an urgent security patch, and said patch is unavailable for the latest reliable release, this makes for a very difficult situation. It leads to a possible choice between "unsecure" or "secure but won't run".

I am not really worried - I doubt that you would do that. With limited resources, you cannot afford the extra work that patching old (stable) releases would require.

You have waay too much good reputation to protect.

Too many happy customers (like me) :)

bharat's picture

Nice analogy. :-) That's not what we're doing though. We're not de-emphasizing our focus on stability in 2.2.

We maintain a high level of stability at all times. This release will be no different. We'll still write unit tests for all new features and undergo the same development and release process. The only difference is that we do not expect to *raise* the level stability in 2.2. Ie, we will not be writing new stability-related features like maintenance tasks that actively look for corrupted data and fix it.

bharat wrote:
Nice analogy. :-) That's not what we're doing though. We're not de-emphasizing our focus on stability in 2.2.

We maintain a high level of stability at all times. This release will be no different. We'll still write unit tests for all new features and undergo the same development and release process. The only difference is that we do not expect to *raise* the level stability in 2.2. Ie, we will not be writing new stability-related features like maintenance tasks that actively look for corrupted data and fix it.

:)

Good - I understand - it was your choice of words that distressed the multi-site production manager in me.

hi
hi, how can i contact with owner of this blog? Give me e-mail please , i have a question.

Regards
Dr. Tomash Sanderson

h0bbel's picture

Blog? Owner? This is the Gallery software site.


h0bbel - Gallery Team
If you found my help useful, please consider donating to Gallery
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org

RC1? Is it here yet? lol... okay, okay, I must be patient..lol.

bharat's picture

We're running a little behind on the 2.2 release .. right now we're tentatively slipping it out 1 month. :-(