Adding a checkout item to a populated album

Checkout 0.1.14 didn't have the visible/not visible option - all products were visible for all items.

The visible/not-visible setting is overridden on an "items take precedence over sub-albums that contain them, and sub-albums over their containing albums" basis.

So you can set it, per product, at (only) the album level for all items both directly in, and in sub albums in, that album. If you want to override that for individual items you can set the required setting for those items only.

The global default for any product is the setting in the checkout configuration page - make that "visible" and in the absence of any other settings for visibility, that product is visible for every item (and can be overridden to be invisible on an album, sub-album, or item basis as described.) Make the global setting "invisible" and the product will appear only where that "invisible" setting has been overridden to "visible", either at album, sub-album, or item level.

Overrides from the global setting can themselves be overridden to the opposite setting at a lower level in the album/sub-album/item hierarchy.

It doesn't make any difference whether you add items before or after products (excepting that obviously a per-item override can only be set after the item exists in the album structure).

If you want to remove a visibility setting at either album, sub-album or item level, tick the "remove local settings" box. You'll have to reapply other local settings.

And just for the sake of completeness, the "global" settings in the checkout configuration page are actually the same as the "local" settings on the root album. Which is why (if I remember right) there's no "remove local settings" on that page.

It does strike me that this is harder to describe than it ought to be...

Ok, I think I see general source of your confusion.

Firstly nomenclature: in checkout-land, an Item is something that you upload to a gallery, typically a photograph. a Product is something that goes in the products table, like "8x10 print".

In your case, you're using checkout (and possibly Gallery too) in a way for which it's not designed. I see your products are not "Products" in the checkout sense but instead individual items each. Checkout was designed for "products" to be sizes of photograph, typically, with every item (photograph) in a gallery able to be purchased in each of those sizes. Checkout works by having the customer choose product-item combinations - that is, a particular photograph, in a particular size. The visible/invisible setting is so that the admin can choose that certain combinations are not available ("this photograph isn't available in 8x10 size") or alternatively that only certain combinaitions are available ("this photograph is only available in 8x10 size")

For photos, this works well: I have 20k photographs on my site, all of which are available in 5 sizes. A regular ecommerce site would probably require me to list each size for each photo - I'd therefore have a total of 100k different entries. With checkout I have only to upload the photographs (20k items) and provide a list of the 5 sizes (5 entries).

Checkout doesn't handle very well the more general eCommerce scenario of each item being a product in its own right (and why should it? it's designed to sell prints of photos, not computer parts, after all). You might be able to make use of the "accessories" feature, or otherwise look at a different ecommerce package. It's not that you can't use checkout/Gallery2 for what you want, but it's going to be awkward or difficult to set up and use, and won't feel right to your customers either - which will cost you sales and therefore $$$$.

Looking at your example also: if your global setting for a product is visible, there's no need to override it locally - make sure *both* radio buttons are empty. Only set a local setting if you want something other than what you set globally.

The only way to clear *both* radio buttons is to use the "remove local settings" box. I'm afraid there's no standard way to implement a Yes/No/Unset triple in a form which is what is needed; you can have yes/no (radio buttons) or on/off (checkbox), and I plumped for the former.