Gallery3 Review - nightly build of 05/05/2009

1) After activating the gallery2 import module, i get a nasty error if i load the maintenance menu:

2) for some reason no graphics kit was activated by default, surely some default choice can be made when i have gd / imagemagick/ graphicsmagick available.

3) when i create a new album I always enter the title, but why not autogenerate a SEF-url for the directory name? how i'd do this:

the title "Sarah's birthday party" autogenerates a dir name "sarahs-birthday-party"
the title "l'été" autogenerates a dir name "l-ete"
the title "100% digital images" autogenerates a dir name "100-digital-images"

The user would still be able to update it if it's far off what should be there, but with a single regex you should be able to do this.

4) after creating a new album there's a green dialog box that sais that it worked, why not include a link here that sais "add some photo's now" so you don't have to use the topnav again? Same could go for all empty albums.

5) the blue "select photos..." button is inside the upload dialog and becomes hidden (you have to scroll down to see it) when you've uploaded as few as 5 pictures, there's a big chance that you want to upload more, so maybe try to keep it visible.

6) resizes don't work out of the box (again) but i don't see any errors anywhere in the graphics toolkit pane
switching to GD and rebuilding all images did the trick, but maybe there needs to be some kind of handling for this?

7) Theme issues (default settings):
7a) the menu that slides down when you hover an image isn't shown correctly in IE7; it's cut of at the bottom
7b) in firefox 3.0.10 the vertical alignment of each thumb & title is far to low, portrait pictures aren't even shown completely (lower part is cut of)
7c first previous next & last buttons at the bottom of an album overview are unreadable in IE7 + firefox 3.0.10, on picture view these are nicely rounded buttons, this look should be conform on the album page.
7d) there is a link in the footer "about this gallery" that refers to #
7e) the "add tag" input field just below the sidebar title "popular tags": this prefilled text "add tag" isn't emptied when i click in the input field. Also it allows to add the text "add tag" (the default prefilled text), you should disable the onclick for the submit button untill the text is different and not blank ;)
7f) in "theme details" the "header text" and "footer text" actually contains a default gallery logo that acts as a home linkt and 2 links in the footer, when you load the theme details page that isn't shown, you might want to show them the default stuff so it's immediatly clear what is there now...also a revert to factory settings option might be nice

8) what is the idea behind having links to two sizes of each image in the rss feed?

9) after rebuilding all resizes using GD, the album highlight still doesn't show anything (all thumbs inside an album are showing, but the album itself doesn't have any thumb associated with it? maybe provide a default "highlight image")

10) in the admin panel, the statistics menu has an on-hover drop shadow, this is inconsistent with other topnav items without children.

11) in the topnavigation (while looking at your albums) the item "admin" should also be clickable and targetting the "dashboard" page imho, then there wouldn't be a need for the "dashboard" link anymore (re-think this please, the same goes for the "options" top navigation item, this should be clickable from any usability point of view (or the text shouldn't underline onhover and change the cursor into a hand)

12) selecting any image to become the album album cover results in a very long twirling "loading" animation (actually, it doesn't end so you don't have to wait. it doesn't matter if you try to do this from an album view or from a single image view)

13) on a single photo view, if the filename == Title == name, I doubt there is much point in displaying it multiple times in the "photo info" sidebar area. just show once instead of twice

14) In "theme details" i change the thumbnail size from 200 to 150 and i get a nice warning at the top of the browser that i need to update (6) images (nicely done!!!) , but the progress bar never starts to move... also there is a pause button but no cancel button? you might want to allow people a clean way out if this hangs. Also on this "progres bar" screen the mouse cursor changes into some "move window" cursor while it shouldn't.

**Don't bother replying yet, i'm still in progress of adding to the starting post of this topic!!!!****

**Upraded to the offical alpha4 version.

20) When I delete multiple albums quickly (deleting one before the first delete is complete) i sometimes get a blank page with this text:

21) when i quickly delete 5 albums in a row (all remain in progress untill after i finish clicking the delete button in the sliding menu), not all albums dissapear untill i do a manual refresh of the page.

22) Album descriptions don't respect soft and hard returns, all text is displayed in one continuous line. When i edit the album again the text is shown with the line breaks, so it's stored in the database correcty but not rendered in the output as i would expect it.

23) in the "album info" block, the description needs a lot more space.

24) general remark about the album descriptions: i would love if there was some basic formatting here, i extensively describe my albums, with a basic biograph of the person that took the pictures, links to their site and sometimes even a profile picture... it would be lovely to see this become a core functionality (basic markup and small images)

In the past this would break the search result layouts as they never expected long descriptive texts for albums.

25) in the image upload dialog, i'm able to click the "done" button right after i've added a set of images. It should finish the upload before returning to the album.

26) "somethingèàlrdr" is accepted as an album directory, while this does seem to work fine, doesn't this pose possible problems with characterencoding?

27) in the admin menu, why call a menu "appearance" when "themes" would be a more logical name for this menu:
Themes > selector
Themes > (current) theme settings
seems a more logical choice

28) the "organiser album" function:
a) when i drag an item, sometimes it doesn't grip on the item and instead i'm just drawing a selection box
b) possibly a postback can be avoided when an item is dragged and instantly dropped back in the same location
c) consider adding a "move left" and "move right" button next to the existing buttons (rotate, album highlight, ...) for people that don't get the drag&drop functionality