Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 is ready!

Three weeks ago we released Gallery 3.0 Alpha 1 and we're happy to say that the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Many of you have given great feedback about the features that you'd like to see in the product and we've been hard at work trying to get the product ready for release. For those of you who used Alpha 1, you can see that there are still plenty of things that we need to improve. To reward you for your patience and give you a taste of what's to come, we're releasing Alpha 2 which has significant improvements!

Intended audience

The Alpha 2 release is still intended for enthusiasts, designers and module developers. This is the right time to do a test drive with the improved user interface and to start developing feature extensions and designing new themes.

Note there is still no upgrade path from Gallery 2 to Gallery 3, nor is there an upgrade path from Alpha 1 to Alpha 2. Yes, that's all coming but no, it hasn't been a high enough priority yet.

Security warning

This is a technology preview of Gallery 3.0 and as such it is not intended to be installed on public websites yet. The application is currently undergoing a professional security audit yet but it may have serious security vulnerabilities. Please resist the temptation to share your test drive with the world and wait for the final release first!

OK OK let me try it already!

With the disclaimers and warnings out of the way, here it is: Download Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 (1.3 MB) .

The Gallery 3 Philosophy

Let's have a closer look at Gallery 3.0 to see why it's so much easier and more fun to customize and extend Gallery 3.0 and how our user centric development process ensures that the user interface is not an afterthought.

  • Scope and target audience - Before starting development on Gallery 3.0, the target audience and the scope of the application have been clearly defined. Gallery 3 is not a general purpose web application handling any file format you throw at it. And it's not supported on every web platform that exists.

    Prudent decisions helped to simplify the product at a very early stage. For instance, there are no longer item-level permissions. Permissions are managed on an album level. This simplified many aspects, from the database, over scalability, up to the user interface.

  • Simple to use - We're glad to have usability and user interface experts on our team, designing and prototyping interfaces that just make sense, avoiding the dreaded text deserts and putting Emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks quick and easy. To see an example of this, check out the admn dashboard and the user/group administration page.

  • Size matters - Gallery 3.0 is currently a mere 3.5MB (uncompressed on your disk), with all its features. Compare that to the 16.5MB of Gallery 2.3's bare bones minimal package. Leaving out some levels of abstraction really helps to lose some weight!

  • On the shoulders of giants... - Gallery 3.0 wouldn't be possible without the great advances of recent years.

    • Gallery 3.0 is built on top of Kohana, a PHP 5 framework that makes PHP application development a breeze. Kudos to the folks from Kohana for their support and for providing this first class application framework!

    • Kohana's prowess in elegance and simplicity couldn't be achieved without the vast improvements of PHP 5 over PHP 4. We're glad we can finally seize the full power of PHP 5. Adios, PHP 4!

    • Remember the days before jQuery? We don't want to look back either :-) It has never easier to add interactivity, AJAX or other custom behaviors to your user interface than it is with jQuery. We use jQuery and jQuery UI widely and UI development couldn't be more hassle-free.

  • Simple to customize - Gone are the days of learning 4 different languages (HTML, JavaScript, Smarty, PHP), many different APIs (theme and core API, Gallery 2 smarty tags) and 10 step tutorials to create your own theme. With Gallery 3, you can create your own theme just by copying an existing theme to a new folder. No further changes necessary to make it work. How's that for easy? There's no templating language to learn other than HTML and PHP.

  • Simple to extend - We've exercised great restraint in keeping things simple and it shows in the small size of existing modules. For instance, it takes a small fraction of the code to create a slideshow or comments module for Gallery 3 than it took to implement the same feature set in Gallery 2.

  • Supported configurations - Gallery 3 is supported on Linux / Unix servers, running a MySQL 5 and an Apache 2.2 web server with PHP 5.2. Emphasis on supported, not necessarily required. It may well work with MySQL 4.1 on MS Windows as well, but the Gallery team is going to focus its energy on making the best possible product on the supported configurations.

Currently Implemented Features

The following features are implemented and functioning at varying levels:

  • A simpler and powerful Flash based upload UI (we're still tinkering with this!) (new in alpha 2)
  • Reset / forgot password mechanism (new in alpha 2)
  • Localized UI with built-in editor (server side support is not finished) (new in alpha 2)
  • RSS feed for comments (new in alpha 2)
  • RSS feed for new images or movies (new in alpha 2)
  • EXIF read support (new in alpha 2)
  • Import photos from the local webserver (new in alpha 2)
  • Support for uploading and viewing FLV movie files (new in alpha 2)
  • Ability to view full size photos (new in alpha 2)
  • Boolean and full text search (new in alpha 2)
  • Album browsing
  • Item commenting, comment moderation
  • Spam protection with Akismet and Recaptcha
  • Image toolkit support for ImageMagick, GD, and GraphicsMagick
  • Theme system, including separate admin theme.
  • Module system to extend the functionality, and a series of existing modules
  • Basic metadata boolean search with relevance ranking
  • Flash-powered slideshow (Cooliris)
  • Album media RSS feeds
  • Quick edits of item metadata
  • In place item deletion and rotation
  • User group management (drag & drop interface)
  • Basic user permission management
  • Admin dashboard with drag and drop blocks

Missing Key Features

These features are yet to be added and will be part of the final 3.0 release:

  • Bulk editing of albums and photos
  • A migration path from Gallery 2
  • An image block for your Gallery or external pages
  • Improved permissions UI.
  • Basic embedding hooks / instructions
  • (opt-in) Stats collection (helps us to improve the product)

Roadmap

Gallery 3.0 is undergoing a professional security audit from our good friends over at Gotham Digital Science. They're going to dissect the code and probe it for security vulnerabilities, then report back to us. We'll fix it all up to be safe and sound before shipping out the final release to you. Your security is important to us!

You can track development on our Trac roadmap and if you can't wait for the next public release, you can track the code via our Subversion repository .

Got feedback?

If you have any overall feedback, please visit the Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 Feedback forum topic and let us know! If you have questions, please visit the Gallery 3 Wiki, the future home for Gallery 3 documentation.

Thanks for answer!

I hope, that at 1000 albums and 50000 photos script of Gallery3 will work nevertheless faster Gallery2.3 ?

I am watching the Gallery 3 threads with great interest. For me the key issue is upgrade process from Gallery 2 and wpg2 plugin for WordPress integration. I hope with time, once Gallery 3 is complete both these issues will be addressed with due diligence.
http://www.digital-photo.com.au

bharat's picture

@skylight Gallery3 should be faster than Gallery2 for any size installation. It's smaller and more efficient. The tradeoff is that it's got less features.

@Ted.Szukalski we'll be getting to work very soon on the upgrade process. stay tuned!

agarg's picture
bharat wrote:
WOO HOO!

Nice job. I love Gallery. Is there a place for us to visit and see a few eye candies? May be a working demo....

Great job, once again.

Mmm! I tried to test your new 3.0, and it looks it will be much faster than 2.3!

Guys, make you 3.x gallery to handle and operate thouthands of photos.

My gallery is "Old Grodno photos": Старые Открытки фотографии Гродно. Гродно.

I'm interested in having the tool of tagging people's faces (as in facebook) is it possible?

bharat's picture

@rgamen Yes. It's in the Alpha 2 release. Enable the "polar rose" module and try it out :-)

Any update on when the Alpha 3 will be released? It is due according to the Trac Roadmap. :)

I am personally looking forward to the following for the Beta 1 release:
(Ok, I know. I am ahead of the plan already.)
#91 Lightbox Module

And also somewhat looking forward to the following (Go iPhone!):
#41 handheld stylesheet for default theme

Also, is there anyone that can give input on a Gallery Remote-module for G3? (If? When? how?)

bharat's picture

Alpha 3 is more or less ready, but we're going to let it bake for a day to make sure that it's somewhat stable. Feel free to get a nightly or grab the code from svn and help us sanity check it!

bharat wrote:
@skylight Gallery3 should be faster than Gallery2 for any size installation. It's smaller and more efficient. The tradeoff is that it's got less features.

@Ted.Szukalski we'll be getting to work very soon on the upgrade process. stay tuned!

Thanks for answer!

I want to create gallery and I think, that Gallery3 will be the best choice for this purpose, certainly, if Gallery3 will support Secondary Features,
is especial the following:

rating: rate an image from 1-5, sort by ratings, show highly rated stuff, etc.
Dynamic Albums (most viewed, most rated, most commented, most recent, randome)
reupload: replace an existing photo with a new one, leaving the metadata intact
symlinks/links: images in album A and album B share the same image file on disk (using symlinks)
related photos: show me the photos related/similar to this one
formatted urls (bbcode, etc): Give me a bunch of HTML snippets that I can use to embed this image in other sites
user info (avatars, im, etc): Allow users to have lots more info in their user page
view counts: Show the number of times an album or photo has been viewed
user registration: Let users sign up for their own account
static pages: Let editors create static page content to make the site more presentable (provide more info, etc)
permalinks: Provide short urls, permanent urls to albums/photos for sharing.
integration with Drupal
favorites: Let me mark this as one of my favorite images in the gallery, then browse my favorites
non image formats: support mp3s, etc.
sitelimit: Resize big images down to smaller ones to save disk space
custom sorts: let me sort my album by some other metric (most views, author's name, etc)
square thumbnails: force thumbnails to be square (or some other aspect ratio) for presentability/consistency
image frames: ability to choose decorative frames to wrap around your images (using CSS, probably)
additional themes: change the look of your Gallery3 with a plugin
custom fields: create your own metadata on a photo and populate it with data
hidden/password protected albums: hide an album so that it only shows up if you know the url, or p/w protect it so that you have to provide a pw to see it.

I wish success developers!

floridave's picture
Quote:
I want to create gallery and I think, that Gallery3 will be the best choice for this purpose, certainly, if Gallery3 will support Secondary Features, is especial the following:

then you go on to list more than fifteen features that G2 already has.
Seems to me like G2 should be your choice. Some of the features you mention will be a long time down the road for G3.

Some of the features you mention should/will be provided by the theme author.
We are hoping that the community will build some cool themes and modules that can be built on a solid core foundation.

Dave
_____________________________________________
Blog & G2 || floridave - Gallery Team

kylehase's picture
bharat wrote:
Alpha 3 is more or less ready, but we're going to let it bake for a day to make sure that it's somewhat stable.

Guess it needs extra baking time.

bharat's picture

:-) Life intervened as most of the devs were busy with other stuff this weekend. I just put the finishing touches on the release news story for the website so (fingers crossed) we should be able to put the release out on March 24th.

would be great! i can't await to play with alpha3...already installed alpha1 and alpha2 and i loved the new look and feel...!

elias.

I've been using the SVN and you guys are doing great work.

bharat's picture
Great news...Alpha 3 is released!
damon18's picture

Bharat,

Thank you for keeping the focus on building a better and easier to use Gallery, and not being drawn into useless philosophical arguments.

Gallery user since 2002

Damon

bharat's picture

:-) It's nice to be appreciated.

sremick, why so basement?

Personally, I can't wait for Gallery 3. The new features look incredible and I'm sure my users will welcome them with open arms. If FreeBSD does not have the support you need, then that is your problem. The Gallery team hears users out and takes suggestions on board, but when you represent one person in ten thousand or so, can you really expect them to?