Gallery 3.0 Alpha 3 is ready!

Localization Features:

Note: The UI for the language settings / admin menu for languages & translations isn't polished yet. It isn't very easy to understand and needs too many clicks. Please bear with us, we'll improve it. :)

Installing Translations:
1. As admin, you first need to select the languages, that should be available to your users.
To do that, go to admin -> settings -> languages. Select the language that should be available and save the selection.
This setting controls which languages are listed in the user settings dialog.

2. Install (=download) the selected translations. At admin -> settings -> languages, click "Get Updates".
This might take a while.

Changing your language preference:
Every user can select a language preference. When logged in, in the upper right corner, click on your username to get the dialog for your user settings. If the admin has installed more than 1 language, this dialog will show a language preference list.

Note: We'll add a language preference option for guests (users that are not logged in) as well.

Note: At this moment, there are just 5 or so translated messages (some Spanish, some German). So even when you change your language preference to something other than English, your Gallery will still show pretty much everything in English.
This will change as we get more and more translations.

Adding translations:
Translating is really quick and easy with Gallery 3.
1. Switch your preference to the language you'd like to translate to. I.e. ensure the language is installed and change the preference in your user settings.
2. Enable the translation mode. Click admin -> settings -> start translating.
3. Browse to a page that has some text that is still in English.
4. At the bottom of the page, in the right corner, click "Translate Text"
5. Scroll down, select a message that you'd like to translate on the left, then enter the translation on the right and click save to save it.
6. Select another message, translate it, etc.
7. Reload the page to see the page with your newly added / modified translations.

Contribute! Sharing your translations:
While translating can be fun, it's still a lot of work if you have to do it all by yourself. So we made it really quick and simple for you to share your translations such that the next user who clicks on "Get Updates", gets all your translations as well.
Initial setup:
1. To share your translations, go to "admin -> settings -> languages".
2. The first time you do this, you need to get an "API key." So you need to follow the link that it displays.
Once you followed the link, it will ask you to register a (free) account on this website here, http://gallery.menalto.com.
Once registered / logged in on http://gallery.menalto.com, it will show you the API key, something like "8373:12121gf21fgf212" (that's just an example, it won't work with this one :) you need to use the one that is shown to you).
3. Copy that API key and paste it into the form field in your gallery "admin -> settings -> languages". and hit "save settings".

Now you're ready to share your translations. To share them:
1. Go to "admin -> settings -> languages"
2. Click "Submit translations".

Note: The "Submit translations" button only appears when you added or modified at least one translation with the translation interface yourself. And it only appears if you've saved the API key some time before.

Customizing / changing text in the user interface:
You can use Gallery's translation system not only to translate all user visible text, but also to customize labels / text. E.g. if you want to change the label "Search Gallery" to "Search Eva's Gallery", then just use the translation UI for that.
1. ensure that the language preference is set English (e.g. in the user settings dialog).
2. Then browse to the page that shows "Search Gallery" and open the translation interface. Select "Search Gallery" in the listed messages, enter "Search Eva's Gallery" as translation and hit save.
3. Reload the page to see the changes take effect.

The user interface is being refined - that's great news, G2 was pretty dorky if you ask me.

But I still have a few complaints:

Let's say I'm creating a new album. I click on "Add an album", and the dialog pops up, with three fields:
- Name
- Title
- Description

Huh? Name and title? What's the difference? No, no, don't send me to the documentation please, that's the wrong, G2-style, answer. G3 should be as user-friendly as Flickr, otherwise why bother doing it? I am a dumb non-technical user (well, just pretending) so this whole business of having names and titles sounds kind of redundant to me.

Okay, after poking around, I figured that Name is the string that goes into the filesystem path, while Title is the stuff displayed on the page for the user to see. From a usability perspective, this is redundant - no, more than that, it's mistaken. Don't take me wrong, you folks made great progress with G3, but you're still dragging a few "G2itis" symptoms after you, which need to be cured.

All the user cares about is the Title. The software should auto-generate the Name, pretty much like Drupal does with the Pathauto module: the author enters a title for the node entry, and Drupal/Pathauto generates the URL automatically. G3 should do the same.

As a supplement, for power users and whatnot, there should be an option to tweak the Name afterwards. But having both Name and Title on the first dialog pop-up is confusing.

Please remove Name from the album creation pop-up and allow the user to optionally alter the Name after the album is created. Name should be autogenerated from Title when the album is created.

Thanks,

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/

I added a few photos and I'm testing the UI. Wow, this looks waaay better than G2! Holee molee, this is great!

The slideshow is actually usable. Not just that, but it's pretty nice-looking. Sweet!

The interface overall is clean and much more user-friendly.

As the owner of the site / album / photo I need to control the slideshow app, whether it advances automatically through the pictures, or whether it waits for user input to go to the next picture. Whether it cycles back to first picture by default, or whether it stops at the end. This is something I want to set at the site level, or album level.

The buttons in image view (show large, album view, add comments, slideshow, etc.) are nice, but you need to put tooltips (mouse over) explanations on them. Or let the admin configure G3, whether the buttons are image-only (the current situation), text-only, or image and text - but even then tooltips would be nice.

When I'm logged in, and I'm inside an album, I want the Add photo button to be more prominent, not hidden in a menu. I was looking at the album kind of confused, until I realized I need to dig through menus to upload pictures. That's not nice. I'm logged in, I'm in an album, I have the rights to upload, then please put a nice big Add Photo button somewhere so I can see it. (remember, I'm the non-tech first time user who is familiar with Flickr or with Apple interfaces, so I expect the same smooth friendly experience from G3)

G3 lets me edit / delete / etc. any picture when I'm viewing the album, but after I clicked on a picture and I'm viewing it, those edit / delete / whatever buttons disappear. This is counter-intuitive. Keep them in both places.

When I edit a picture, it's the same issue like when I create an album: G3 shows me Name, Title, and Description. I understand Description, but Name and Title??? What is that?
The user, in 99% of the cases, only wants to edit the Title. The Name is usually irrelevant. I would even take that option out if I could. If you disagree with that, at least make the "Name" change less prominent, and inform the user that it's actually the File name that it's going to change. Yeah, go ahead, call it "File name", it won't confuse the non-techies, it's actually going to explain the function better.
Name and Title are too similar in meaning and are confusing.

You guys need to push that Name thing down everywhere and make it less prominent - in album creation, image editing, Photo Info block, everywhere. It's irrelevant for most users. Title is what they are looking for. Name is a technicality.

Uploading the pictures with "add a photo" failed with error 500. Server logs provide no clue. I enabled "add from server" and that one worked. This is Ubuntu 8.10, G3 was installed from the command line.

I configured G3 to resize all photos to 1024 pixels instead of the default 640, and it does, but it still displays them scaled at 689 pixels. Maybe it's a theme issue?

Once G3 goes stable, I am going to replace G2 immediately. Good job, folks!

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/

I'm also too lazy to check but it sounds like the first imports from the local file system and the other adds from a remote web server over HTTP.

@AdrianB: The difference is that one of those lines in the news story was written by me, and one was written by talmdal. :-) We messed up-- I'll fix that shortly. Both of them are for the server_add module which lets you add photos that are already on your server (eg: stuff you've already ftp'd or otherwise copied to the server).

@florin_andrei: I agree with you about the name field. I've created ticket #179 to track it. I agree with your usability feedback; most of that is already slated to be addressed in the upcoming Beta 1 release. Keep an eye out for that. If you'd like, please feel free to file individual tickets for those items too so that you can be notified when we fix them. For the add photo problem, are you uploading a file without an extension? What's the name of the file that's causing the problem? The issue with having the resized photos show up at a smaller size is a theme decision; it's a fixed layout theme so we scale the resized down to avoid breaking the layout. You can clone the theme and remove that restriction if you'd like to play with it. THANKS for the feedback!

Unable to upload pictures. Upload error: 403.
Anny suggestions?

@eliasgruber: I filed https://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/184 about the sorting issue. The rest of these are feature requests that we will eventually get to, please file them, thanks

@aalang: can you make sure you're not getting logged out during the upload process? If you are, try editing core/config/session.php and set the 'regenerate' value to 0.

@talmdal: I am from HK. This is already 1:30am here. I won't be testing until tomorrow later afternoon. I will provide more details after testing.

There are sooooooooooo many files under the var/albums folder now, it is taking age to remove them all.

@eliasgruber: yea, i just realized that was an issue. I just committed a change that will sort the directories and files separately and then merge them together so that the sorted directories appear first followed by the files. Sorry for being so dense

@cmjimmy: no hurray, when every you get a chance.

http://www.timalmdal.com

No, I'm not getting logged out, meaning I don't have to log back inn after "upload". The upload progress bar indicates that the upload progresses normally, but when full it displays the error.(setting the 'regenerate' value to 0 did not solve the issue)

@cmjimmy: thanks for the update, it certainly explains why I had no trouble, but it wasn't working for you. I've added international characters in folder names to ticket 106 (http://gallery.menalto.com/gallery_3.0_alpha_3_released#comment-304060).

If you have have an enhancement request (i.e. links) you could add it on the sourceforge trac (https://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/newticket). I never really thought of links, as I tend to upload them to a staging directory and then delete them from the staging directory when I've imported them. It also might add some complexity down the road when trying to add the rearrange functionality having to worry about links and not actual pictures. No guarantees of course, but at least its logged.

http://www.timalmdal.com

@engineer: already identified and fixed: https://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/gallery/ticket/181

http://www.timalmdal.com

OK, I figured it out: creating the parent directories as parent albums is wrong. That's what you don't like, that's what I don't like either.

But creating the child directories of the current imported directory might be good. Really, I think it is good and natural behavior. If the directory you're importing from server has sub-directories, those should be created as sub-albums. Just don't replicate its parent directories, all the way up to the designated repository on the server.

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/

Or, the user will have to create a dedicated upload directory on the server, and always use that one and only that one to put pictures in the gallery. Then delete the pictures from the "buffer" directory.

Both solutions are kind of clunky (multiple authorized directories will create "garbage" in the configuration, or stale entries for directories long gone; the single "buffer" directory requires the user to be more disciplined than strictly necessary and, indeed, than many of them are capable of), but the users may tolerate them in the end, I hope. :-/

Would you accept patches by a 3rd party? (assuming I find some time to hack the code myself and send patches to the G3 team for review)

I hope y'all don't mind me poking at the alpha and making comments here. I am wearing the "dumb user's hat", intentionally avoiding to look at the software from the perspective of a programmer. That's why I'm saying - sure, from a programmer's perspective it makes sense to create multiple authorized directories, but from the user experience perspective that's pretty sub-optimal. The unsuspecting user will probably authorize their entire home directory (or worse you know how users are) and then expect the application to behave the way I described above.

I think G3 is moving in a very good direction - perhaps that's why it's important to nip all the "geeky" bits in the bud, and offer a uniform user-friendly and intuitive behavior.

--
Florin Andrei
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/

@florin_andrei: comments and feedback is always good and sooner is better when the API's are more fluid than later when it is more difficult to change.

Patches or suggestions are always welcome, at this point the coding standards are fairly simple: 2 space indent, no tabs, 100 char line limit, LF as line break, open brace on the same like as the statement. The closer you get to that the easier it is for someone on the team to integrate.

We have a long list at of fixes and enhancements, so any help to make that easier is always welcome

Tim

http://www.timalmdal.com

@malmdal: I have just figured out about the character conversions. I have to enable the foreign language (in my case is Chinese) and then change it to be the default language. Browsing to the photos now seems to have no problem.... This is working different from Gallery2.... Cheers

@brashquido great to hear that it's running fast on IIS7! We're using short tags because it means that the PHP in our template/theme code is a little tighter. For example, with short tags:

  <?= $theme->site_menu() ?>
  <a href="<?= url::site("albums/{$parent->id}?show=$item->id") ?>"><?= $parent->title ?></a>

instead of:

  <?php echo $theme->site_menu() ?>
  <a href="<?php echo url::site("albums/{$parent->id}?show=$item->id") ?>"><?php echo $parent->title ?></a>

The reason why short tags was deprecated, about 6 years ago (I remember when I ported Gallery 1 away from short tags!) was because the "<?" symbol interferes with the header in XML files. But in retrospect that was a mistake.. they should never have gone to a more verbose format for tags. Either way, we have yet to find a site that cannot support short tags and it makes our code more dense so we're going to stick with it until we find a compelling reason to switch away.

See the attached screen dump.
Anny error logs to check? Permissions to alter? Anny ideas?

side note: depreciation (finance / accounting) != deprecation (used in software)

Hi there,

I've installed Gallery3 alpha3 few minutes ago, and I found that I can't add new user, click on the "Add a new user" is doesn't do anything, but I can add new group by click on the "Add a new group"(in Linux platform, but in Windows platform, the window shown to create new group is very small in "Name",textarea,submit button and "Cancel").[img]http://vwww.where-is-it.info/gal3apa3_addnewgroup.png[/img]

Is anyone have the same problem? or is anywhere I've to adjust or setup?

Thanks.

Quick comment for Usability. When setting up. I know you want to keep it simple, but the "root" folder is always called gallery. What about the idea of during setup, you ask, "What would you like the name of your gallery?" or something like that. Then when setup is finished, the "root" folder will not be called gallery but something that looks more personal. Maybe even just "username gallery" or something like that. Just trying to brain storm and throw out an idea.

No, thats not what I'm referring to. I'm talking about visually you see Gallery as the root bread crumb after install.

My point is why should I have to go and change that again. I would have thought that you could do that during the install and not have to manually change it.

I shared this view with you... fully support.

Well for me a result is very significant, because Cooliris for now doesn't give me the possibility to choose actual size of picture and the picture doesn't look good. Beside that slide show gives me an option of downloading pictures in advance and I don't have to wait them because of slow server connection.

Hey,

I 'm new to this script but it looks nice!
Most of the work i do is concert photography.
I d like to know how deep the tree can go.
for example albums: music -> Fest/Event -> Band (photo)
Is this possible?

And any clue on when Gallery 3.0 is totaly ready?

Tnx a lot
Mathijs