A few general Qs about Gallery 2

fredriley

Joined: 2005-12-16
Posts: 19
Posted: Fri, 2006-01-13 13:29

I'm nearly done testing and evaluating Gallery 2 as an image management system, and will recommend that our educational organisation (www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk) take it on, and if it is adopted then we'll be using Gallery as an IMS for e-learning software developers at multiple sites to share images and animations they've created.

I've a few questions - not problems, honest! - which I'd be grateful if any of you could answer. We'll be using Gallery within Joomla, so it could be that some of these points can be resolved by Joomla, but I've not had a chance to properly test that yet.

1. Portability. How easy, or not, is it to export the files and their metadata from Gallery 2 in a standards-compliant format? I know you can copy one gallery installation to another (FAQ) but I'm looking to the future, when we might have thousands of files in Gallery which we'll want to move to, say, a Digital Asset Management System. I know that the image files are in the gallery data directory, but the metadata is of vital importance and needs to be preserved.

2. Related to the above, can Gallery export file metadata as XML in a standards-compliant format (eg Dublin Core, OAI)? We might wish to expose our images and metadata as XML files for harvesting.

3. Is there any external software available to provide thumbnail support in Gallery for AI, WMF and SWF formats? Our developers regularly use Adobe Illustrator and Flash to create vector images, and use vector Clip Art which often comes in WMF. Whilst any file format can be stored on Gallery it would be very useful to see thumbnails to save developers time in choosing the correct image.

4. Is there any way of searching individual custom fields in Gallery? The Advanced Search has a single check box for custom fields, but it would be useful to search on one or more particular custom fields. (I've also a feature suggestion here - it would be nice to search for technical attributes, eg resolution, date photo taken, file format.)

Many TIA for any comments/info on the above, and thanks for all those who've answered my other posts to these fora.

Cheers

Fred
 
valiant

Joined: 2003-01-04
Posts: 32509
Posted: Fri, 2006-01-13 15:01

1. portability / export:
- G2 stores meta data in a SQL database
- the only thing that is stored on disk-only are the album files (images, videos, ..) in the g2data/albums/ folder, very clean, as you uploaded them
- there is IPTC/EXIF/... which are standards on how to store meta data within the image files.
but the way import / export to other photo album software applications is done is via a conversion script. you have to know the SQL schema of G2 and the target application and then you can export/import the data. the same way we're importing Gallery 1 or coppermine albums into Gallery 2.
you could write a XML or CSV file export script for metata for g2, or pack it into a module. i guess this would be fairly popular since you could use it also to export data from one G2 installation to another, or as a database independent backup.
- @database dependence: some users migrated their gallery 2 from mysql to postgresql or the other way around. or from windows to linux etc. you can't do it in 5 minutes, but it's reasonable easy.

2. export metadata to XML
- not yet, no. you could write a module to do that or file a feature request if you can't find it on http://gallery.menalto.com/sfvote/all

3. wmf, ai, swf formats
- WMF yes, already built-in in the current nightly snapshot of g2 (which is almost what you get with G2.1).
- AI: no, but could probably be added in a few minutes (i guess imagemagick supports it).
- SWF: nope, thumbnails of SWF / flash animations isn't possible. but a recent user contributed module of g2 auto-detects the dimensions of flash movies and thus when you view a swf item in g2 you see the animation without having to set the dimensions manually.
i've searched for tools to create thumbnails from SWF, but there are none / no free ones.
- you can set manually a custom thumbnail for any item in g2...

4. search a specific custom field only
- not yet. you could file a feature request if there is no ralted RFE yet
 
fredriley

Joined: 2005-12-16
Posts: 19
Posted: Fri, 2006-01-13 16:15

Thanks, Valiant, that's all very useful to know, and I'll store it away for future reference. As regards AI, unfortunately GraphicsMagick (aka Son of ImageMagick ;-)) doesn't support it, although it does support some 80-odd formats. The custom thumbnail wouldn't be much use, I'm afraid, as I'd like our developers to be able to view previews of AI and SWF images before they download them. However, we could ask them to export JPEGs of their images to upload to Gallery for preview purposes.

The reason I asked about searching custom fields is that it might be useful to catalogue images with the Dublin Core metadata schema, for future interoperability with other image databases. I don't know if it's worth putting this in as a feature request as it's quite a niche requirement which likely wouldn't apply to 99% of Gallery users.

Cheers

Fred
 
valiant

Joined: 2003-01-04
Posts: 32509
Posted: Fri, 2006-01-13 16:53

filing feature requests shouldn't be questioned even if you think it might be very unpopular.
you'll see how popular it is by browsing to http://gallery.menalto.com/sfvote/all where users can vote for feature requests.

@AI:
obviously imagemagick supports it neither.
but in adobe illustrator, you can export the file as eps and imagemagick / g2 can generate thumbnails / resizes for eps graphics.