Photo Gallery Forums

Hi, I have some questions before purchase.

I would like the following:

1. A website with a HTML menu at the top and a gallery that scales dynamically to the window below that. Like this:
http://portfolio.pettermagnusson.se/por ... index.html
Possible with your .SWF to integrate and scale like that?

2. I want it as clean as the example, possibly even removing the thumbs. Can that be done? Found this Imagevue site that does almost what I want:
http://www.raulsaez.es/en/
How much of the user interface in the portfolio part be removed ?

3. If I keep the thumbs, I want then on the side, not below. OK?

4. When scaling, does it fetch the images from the server at the correct resolution, and does the server apply sharpening at that resolution?

5. The same backend server should also serve another portion of the site where I will have more text, and several galleries mixed between blocks of text. Those galleries does not have to scale, and should preferrably be non-flash, and with minimal user interface. Perhaps thumbs and next/prev buttons only. OK?

6. The backend server should contain folders for all my differend flash and non-flash aglleries. OK?

7. Do you also provide a programmes API and/or source if I want a developer to go beyound what you offer, but still use the same backen?

PS. Users, please send links to great looking minimalist sites!

Rgds
Petter Magnusson
Fotograf
www.fotograf.pettermagnusson.se

pmagi wrote:1. A website with a HTML menu at the top and a gallery that scales dynamically to the window below that. Like this:
http://portfolio.pettermagnusson.se/por ... index.html
Possible with your .SWF to integrate and scale like that?

This website is your I presume then? Yes, you can use Imagevue like this. Basically, you just need to substitute the imagevue gallery with the gallery that you have there now. Of course, you are yourself managing your non-imagevue pages like "About" and "contact" ...

pmagi wrote:2. I want it as clean as the example, possibly even removing the thumbs. Can that be done? Found this Imagevue site that does almost what I want:
http://www.raulsaez.es/en/
How much of the user interface in the portfolio part be removed ?

I am happy to say this is a strong part of Imagevue, and you can remove almost any elements, and even minimize others. You can for example make smaller thumbnails, less thumbnails, avoid thumbnails, make buttons smaller, or remove certain buttons, remove the main menu etc ... The tough part, is that because there are so many options, it is slightly overwhelming to locate all these options in the settings, but we are here to help you.

pmagi wrote:3. If I keep the thumbs, I want then on the side, not below. OK?

Unfortunately, this is simply not an option in Imagevue. You can display the thumbnails on stage and/or below the image in image-mode, but there are no options to move thumbnails to the side. There are however many settings to change the thumbnails below... You can for example remove that margin as on the site you mention, and you can make thumbnails even smaller (making the gallery more subtle)

pmagi wrote:4. When scaling, does it fetch the images from the server at the correct resolution, and does the server apply sharpening at that resolution?

No, imagevue(flash) resizes the images on clientside. It has the best resizing method possible, but I can tell you from my knowledge that they are not as sharp as the original image, but not too bad either. It would be too much of a demand on server to provide images in real-time based on size of the browser, and besides, what happens when the user scales the browser or other navigation elements come into action? This is a compromise, and my opinion on this is to create optimal size images ... perhaps 1024px length ... and visitors with nice full-size monitors (1280px or larger LCD) will be viewing the original images un-scaled at original sharpness(of course). Images will only be downsized where necessary because of smaller screen sizes.

pmagi wrote:5. The same backend server should also serve another portion of the site where I will have more text, and several galleries mixed between blocks of text. Those galleries does not have to scale, and should preferrably be non-flash, and with minimal user interface. Perhaps thumbs and next/prev buttons only. OK?

Sorry, I am not sure I understand this question. You are free to run any other services on your server unrelated to imagevue ... Are you suggesting some optional interface?

pmagi wrote:6. The backend server should contain folders for all my differend flash and non-flash aglleries. OK?

I am not quite sure what you mean here either. Sure, Imagevue uses FOLDERS to mange galleries. You can access these image folders for your "other pages" also ... or if you like, you can create separate folders for them (in this case, it is nothing imagevue will handle for you of course).

pmagi wrote:7. Do you also provide a programmes API and/or source if I want a developer to go beyound what you offer, but still use the same backen?

YES. The entire Imagevue system is based on XML, and we welcome 3rd parties to create separate frontend-interfaces wther they be flash or html. Of course, if you are talking about editing the FLASH imagevue gallery itself, this has nothing to do with an API, but would require editing the imagevue FLA soruce file, which we do not usually recommend.

Thanks for the answers!

1. Yes, it my site... I just want to upgrade to ahve a back-end...

3. I think you should consider an option for thumbs on the side. Look at a typical browser window area and you will see why. Vertical space is very limited, but there is usually lots of horizontal space when displaying an image!

4. Slideshow pro does actually sharpen the images when using ImageMagick on the server side....but then it does not have HTML gallery as an option for example... But it shows that its possible, and it looks darn good when you present the images sharpened at the display size!

5. What I tried to say is that I will have several galleries spread out on the site. One mail FLASH gallery and several galleries embedded in the text pages. Will look a bit like a blog I guess....And I wondered how the backend handles a range of galleries like that....?

7. So you give out the "source code?

Rgds
PM

5. When you say "several galleriers", do you mean imagevue galleries or galleries from other providers? We cant speak for other galleries of course, but they are welcome to extract files from the same image folders as imagevue uses. If you want to integrate multiple imagevue galleries, that is possible, and you you can trigger different content for each gallery (eg. target a specific folder or content folder). You can also change the theme for each gallery, but you cannot currently change the main config settings which are global for all galleries (until next major release, where you choose config per gallery instance).

7. When you said API, I though you meant the PHP API (which is XML), which certainly is available. We also do provide the FLA source files for those who are interested, but this is far from some API ... You may also want to read this: viewtopic.php?t=4233

Thanks!

5. I just menat to have several of your galleries up on the same site and how to handle config and image selection from the backend in that case.

7. I did mean PHP API, but its interesting to know the possibility to get the FLA too!

About sharpening, would you say it could be possible to write some PHP code that intercepts your request for an image, read the output dimensions, ask your PHP script for the image and then scales the image and sharpens it before sending it to the client side...? Or will the server not know the output size of the current window?

Rgds
PM

pmagi wrote:5. I just menat to have several of your galleries up on the same site and how to handle config and image selection from the backend in that case.

Basically, you can have multiple galleries running multiple themes. For example, you can have two galleries: In each above link, the gallery would load content+folder-structure from two separate main folders(we call content folders). Also, you are using two separate themes. The main settings however, are global for both galleries. If you for some reason need separate main settings, you may need to consider setting up two separate physical uploads of imagevue.

pmagi wrote:About sharpening, would you say it could be possible to write some PHP code that intercepts your request for an image, read the output dimensions, ask your PHP script for the image and then scales the image and sharpens it before sending it to the client side...? Or will the server not know the output size of the current window?

Personally, I am very skeptical about this ... Do you have a link where slideshowpro handles this? First of all, you are putting a lot of load on the server because it takes a lot of capacity to resize photos on-the-fly. Second, it would certainly slow down your gallery quite a a lot ... I am not even sure your server has the power to be resizing full-size images on-the-fly for possibly multiple visitors simultaneously. Technically, this would be possible ... It would have to be the flash file that calculates what size it wants, and then request this size from PHP, which will take care of the image processing. Of course, this will not handle images if the visitor then also resizes the browser ...