What about these features I came up with:
Item integrity
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Whenever I upload an item (picture, movie ..) to the gallery, I want to be able to verify if the file is not currupted later on. You never know what might happen during a disk faillure or something similar.
Therefore a field in the database that contains the MD5 sum of that file is a good idea. The admin can run a check on all items in his gallery before doing a backup, so he'll know fur sure that there's nothing wrong with the gallery and its contents (unless the md5 code doesn't function correctly.. aaargh!).
This functionality could be extended with an option for the admin to restore only currupt items to his gallery from a backup.
Automatic picture rating (also read next feature that is an alternative to this one)
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My gallery is one with way too many pictures. I'd like to keep them all in my collection but friends looking through my vacation album when there are at least 300 pictures taken isn't something they like to do.
My experience is that many users browse quickly through the first few pages of thumbnails and look at some pictures that have comments or have a high view count. The last photos in the album are rarely seen (especially by dialup users).
I propose a dynamic album that puts the most interesting pictures on the first album page (selected by gallery depending on the view count and/or amount of comments).
Album depth (compare to the feature above this one)
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The problem with the above feature is that it shuffles your pictures around in the album so the timeline is gone.
It may be anough for a lazy admin but I need something better.
Another approach for providing the users with the amount of photo's they feel comfortable with is this one:
Every user needs a property in its profile that contains the 'album depth level'. This is an integer. Most likely it has a default value of 10.
I'll give an example of how this should work:
I've got an album with 10 pictures, named 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10
The admin can assign a depth level to each of those pictures.
I really like every user to see pictures 5 and 7 so I assign depth level 0 to them.
I like pictures 2 and 8 too, but I don't want to bother users at low connection speeds with it because they're not as nice as pictures 5 and 7, I assign depth level 1 to them.
The other pictures (1, 3, 4, 6, 9 and 10) are not really interesting for users but I like them myself, therefore I assign depth level 100 to them.
So what's the point you might ask???
Because an anonymous user won't be bothered with uninteresting photo's by default (his/her depth level is 10) unless he really wants to see them.
So, to finish my example: any user with a depth level of 10 will only see photo's that have a depth level between 0 and 10. Those users will only see pictures 2, 5, 7 and 8 (in that order).
If a user with slow internet access has the depth level set to 0 he'll only see the nicest pictures because I made the selection for him. See? That's nice, isn't it??
Those are the basics. Now it's time to expand the feature a bit:
Temporarily expand your depth level
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There are still photo's at depth level 100 in our example album. So besides picture 2, 5, 7 and 8 the user should see a fifth picture (a meta-picture is the correct term I think) that displays the text: 'click here to see all photo's ' or something like that. It expands the depth level for this current session in this album or maybe also for other albums he/she will visit during this session.
If the user wants a different depth level permanently, he should change the property in his profile.
Password protect depth levels
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I may have given this feature not enough thought because it might conflict with passwords set on usernames.
Anyway, it would be nice to protect certain ranges of depth levels with a password because only your best friends are allowed to see photo's at a certain (low) depth levels.
Hopefully somebody will agree with me on (at least one of) the usefullness of these features so they might become reality in G2.
For now, I'm a very happy user of G1.
Thanks for all the work you put in it Bharat (& team).
:grin:
Posted: Wed, 2002-10-23 15:20
Posts: 7994
The combination of these two features sounds a lot like the way that Slashdot's moderation scheme works. We can definitely do ratings in G2 (it'll be a separate add-on module). I'll look into the possibility of restricting the view based on your preferred level and the level of the photos in the system.
Posts: 38
instead of the depth idea (which seems cumbersome to use) why not make an option in the properties of each gallery to either leave the pics in their proper order or to dynamically reorganize them, and also on what criteria (most views, comments, or last updated) ?
I host a site with plenty of users and every week i manually rearrange the albums chronologically by last-update. this feature would be cool, and also allow some things like photologs to remain static.
Posts: 7994
daoist,
G2 will allow you to sort pictures based on core criteria. Right now you can sort based on Title, Creation Date, Last Modified Date, Description or Keywords. By G2.1, you'll be able to sort on view counts, comments, etc (sorting by plug-in data is a bit trickier).
What kvdb is suggesting is something different; he's talking about filtering the data based on relevance. That will be orthogonal to sorting .. you'll be able to have both in effect at the same time.
Posts: 29
That's exactly what I meant, but in better english and only 2 lines of text :wink: