Downloading files from Gallery
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fredriley
Joined: 2005-12-16
Posts: 19 |
Posted: Thu, 2006-01-12 15:05
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Hi again I don't know what forum this query should go into, so I thought it had best go here. I've come across an 'issue' which could deal a fatal blow to our using Gallery. I'm working on behalf of a multi-site educational organisation which needs to share media files - bitmaps, vectors, animations, etc - amongst distributed e-learning software developers. I've spent some days testing Gallery, but just today decided to look at how users can download from albums, and got a sinking feeling as there is no download option in the shopping cart. That is, the user can add any albums or files to the cart, but when s/he goes to the cart there's no download option in the Cart Actions drop-down list. I know that Gallery can be set up to allow cart downloads as a zip file, but I'm surprised that, without that module installed and configured, there's no means of downloading selected files. Am I missing something really obvious here? I've had a look through FAQs and searched the fora but can't find anything relevant. Of course, a user can download a particular image by viewing it full-size, then right-clicking and saving it to disk, but this is a pain to do for multiple files, and of course doesn't work for those file formats, such as SWF (of which we have a lot), which Gallery can't display. One other minor point. When a user clicks "add to cart" for an album or a file, s/he's taken directly to the shopping cart and has to navigate back to the page s/he was on to add further files. This is quite a pain, but I can't see anything in the admin interface to alter this. I like the system used by the Microsoft Office Clipart gallery (http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/) whereby the user ticks a check box to add images to a "selection basket" but remains on the page with the images until s/he goes to the basket to download. Cheers Fred |
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Posts: 2258
The G2 cart was set up firstly for printing images with printing services and later on the download as zip function was added (If I remember right).
How would the "download" option as individual files work for someone with a lot of things in their cart? Would a lot of seperate download windows be any easier than downloading each image/item from the album its in?
Posts: 19
If I'd known that when I first came across Gallery, I don't think I'd have even looked at it, as we're after an image management system, but now that I've spent over 30 hours testing and evaluating it I'm loathe to ditch it as it's quite a nice bit of software once you get it working. I know the Gallery About section describes it as a photo album organizer, but I suppose I was seduced by the feature list at http://www.gallery-addons.com/content/view/64/124 into thinking it was an IMS.
Out of curiousity, has anyone surveyed Gallery users to see what they're using it for?
Yes, given that Gallery only supports a few bitmap formats natively. If you can't view a file in a non-supported format in an album then you can't download it. ImageMagick, and latterly GraphicsMagick, allow support for 80-odd file formats, but amongst those WMF (and other vector formats, such as CGM) is only viewable with an(other) external library, and Illustrator isn't supported at all. Neither is SWF, and sadly many of our developers draw vector images in Flash.
I'm only a beginner with PHP, but I'm sure some way of multiple downloading of raw files could be figured out so that there's only one rather than many download windows. Anyway, that's just speculation. In the meantime I've found, after two failures with gzip and Gnu Windows gzip, a zip executable that Gallery will work with, so the Zip download option now appears in the cart.
What would definitely be useful would be for the user not to be taken to the cart every time s/he adds a file to it, but to be left on the same album page. A check box by each file and an "add selected to cart" option would be handy.
Cheers
Fred
Posts: 2258
Gallery trys to meet the goal of "Your Photos on Your Website." Everything on that gallery-addons page looks to be correct and if you are having trouble finding any of that or using any of the functionality described there, ask away.
We have not surveyed Gallery users to see what they are using it for (and thats a good idea, I may do that as the next poll on this website), but every install that I have ever seen has been sharing pictures with customers or friends.
I'm pretty sure if your Gallery won't generate the resized/thumbnails/etc it places a "Full size: Document" link on the page to allow you to download it. That's been my experience with some photoshop files.
We've had many requests for displaying Flash inline in an album and that should happen eventually.
There isn't a way to download lots of separate files with one download window. This would require an insecure browser that lets the system access the file system other ways than the save file dialog box. Zipping things up is fairly straightforward and most servers and clients can handle it.
That has been requested before and will probably end up being a site admin option for the cart eventually.
Posts: 1
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