X3Photo Gallery Forums

pols1337 · 11 Mar 2011, 17:40

Hi,

I'm a new user to Imagevue and I love it - the sleek, modern navigation and Flash-based gallery system is beautiful. However, using Imagevue non-stop for the last couple of days during my college spring break made me really wish for the following, almost all dealing with faster / better functionality of the Manage panel:

1. Text-viewing of Thumbnails - When opening a folder of images in Manage, there are two options to view thumbnails (List or Grid). Can I suggest a text-only version? The benefit is a much faster loading of page. Right now, every thumbnail must be loaded which slows the page down ... a lot ... I beg of you to implement this option, especially for those of us running large galleries (by large, I mean thousands and thousands of pictures. It's taken me about four hours this afternoon just to modify 50 folders in Imagevue for ~8000 images.

2. Thumbnail previews on folder - The thumbnail previews of folders should be shown. I think it would be useful and beneficial to see thumbnail preview on the folder, but this is not a biggie.

3. Overall faster speed in the Manage panel - While I understand this is partially a function of my web server and hosting service, my old galleries (powered by Coppermine and MySQL databases) were able to quickly handle 60,000+ pictures with visitors, rating systems, and comments. Then I switch over to Imagevue, and just modifying folder properties in Manage makes me feel like I'm in slow-motion (and not in a cool, futuristic way, lol). Don't know what you can do here, but wish it would load / execute faster.

4. Sorting - Sweet baby jesus, I have no idea how Imagevue does "Auto" sorting, lol. You should just put it on Name Ascending as default.

The above items are things that I think ought to be implemented and are deep frustrations of mine, probably shared by many others. The below are "for fun" suggestions that I think would help:

1. Random image - it'd be cool to offer a parameter or picture function that pulls a random picture from a designated folder or from the entire gallery.

2. Ratings - looking at the suggestion website and these forums, a lot of people want this. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it would be nice.

3. Favicon - perhaps you offer the option of changing the Favicon somewhere, but if not then it can be added.

Sincerely,
Joel / pols1337

13 Mar 2011, 03:08

Thanks a lot for your suggestions.

pols1337 wrote:1. Text-viewing of Thumbnails - When opening a folder of images in Manage, there are two options to view thumbnails (List or Grid). Can I suggest a text-only version? The benefit is a much faster loading of page. Right now, every thumbnail must be loaded which slows the page down ... a lot ... I beg of you to implement this option, especially for those of us running large galleries (by large, I mean thousands and thousands of pictures. It's taken me about four hours this afternoon just to modify 50 folders in Imagevue for ~8000 images.

Although I don't see how users would be able to properly navigate folders without displaying the thumbnail, but it makes sense as an option if you have titles and know what is going on in your own folders. We will definitely take a look at this!

pols1337 wrote:2. Thumbnail previews on folder - The thumbnail previews of folders should be shown. I think it would be useful and beneficial to see thumbnail preview on the folder, but this is not a biggie.

This makes sense. We would have to somehow scale and perhaps crop the preview-image though to suit the the folder-icon. Users have different thumbnail-sizes.

pols1337 wrote:3. Overall faster speed in the Manage panel - While I understand this is partially a function of my web server and hosting service, my old galleries (powered by Coppermine and MySQL databases) were able to quickly handle 60,000+ pictures with visitors, rating systems, and comments. Then I switch over to Imagevue, and just modifying folder properties in Manage makes me feel like I'm in slow-motion (and not in a cool, futuristic way, lol). Don't know what you can do here, but wish it would load / execute faster.

This is a bit more complex, and we have already been working to make things faster. There is certainly no button we can click "make faster". Imagevue, unlike most other galleries, is folder-based. For the frontend, we use cache, but because the admin needs to be 100% real-time, it must somehow get all actual content (not from cache). I will forward this to Nick.

pols1337 wrote:4. Sorting - Sweet baby jesus, I have no idea how Imagevue does "Auto" sorting, lol. You should just put it on Name Ascending as default.

Well, "auto" simply means the way your server is sorting them. I understand the confusion though.

...

pols1337 wrote:1. Random image - it'd be cool to offer a parameter or picture function that pulls a random picture from a designated folder or from the entire gallery.

There is already "filemod" randomimage, which allows the gallery to load a random image from a folder. Read more:
https://www.photo.gallery/documentation/filemod/

pols1337 wrote:2. Ratings - looking at the suggestion website and these forums, a lot of people want this. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it would be nice.

Yes. To me it seems more like gallery owners / photographers are looking for a way to get interaction/feedback from their users however, than actually having a rating system. I don't see how in average galleries, the visitors are gonna be "rating" the images. Mostly they are there to glance at the quality of the owners work, and not spend time "rating". Guestbook should be coming up very soon, and of course we will consider a rating system also ...

pols1337 wrote:3. Favicon - perhaps you offer the option of changing the Favicon somewhere, but if not then it can be added

Right. Well, you need to actually create your own favicon first of all, and if you get that far, then you would simply upload it by FTP overwriting the existing one. Hardly a task that will be repeated.

Thanks again for your useful suggestion!

Nick · 13 Mar 2011, 23:02

Thank you for the suggestions, nice to read a thought-out review. I'd like to clear some things out though:

1. Text-viewing of Thumbnails ... Right now, every thumbnail must be loaded which slows the page down

What do you mean exactly here? Once you load the page once all thumbnails should get cached. Are they getting reloaded each time at your side?

2. Thumbnail previews on folder - The thumbnail previews of folders should be shown.

This is in the todo list, just didn't get there yet

3. Overall faster speed in the Manage panel

We're improving our caching techniques, but this is not easy. For large galleries fast file system is a must. Don't expect any miracles soon, but we still got a trick or two up the sleeve for the future.

4. Sorting - Sweet baby jesus, I have no idea how Imagevue does "Auto" sorting, lol.

This is a bug unfortunately, auto sorting got broken on the way. This will be fixed in the next release.

1. Random image - it'd be cool to offer a parameter or picture function that pulls a random picture from a designated folder or from the entire gallery.

By the way you can add the suggestion for features you consider useful to our feedback forum: http://imagevue.uservoice.com

2. Ratings - looking at the suggestion website and these forums, a lot of people want this. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it would be nice.

What we could offer is just store ratings for the images, if you would like some sort of Charts and Most Popular - this is actually bit hard to do due to the file-based nature of the gallery.

3. Favicon - perhaps you offer the option of changing the Favicon somewhere, but if not then it can be added.

I'll write this down in Ideas for the future.

pols1337 · 18 Mar 2011, 17:30

Thanks to both mjau-mjau and pain for your well-done responses. I appreciate the time you spent in replying. Here are some helpful things that I was thinking about, which might clarify:

1. I think users who wish for a text-only version of a folder can navigate their folders well enough (once again, I'm suggesting this as an option to the thumbnail or list view, so they still switch back and forth if they want to see thumbnails). I've named my files in alpha numeric order such as AlbumName_001, AlbumName_002, AlbumName_003, so I already know exactly what file corresponds to what. I don't really need the thumbnails to show up since I already know what the thumbnails are.

To explain the motivation, some folders may contain a lot of pics. Like, thousands of pictures! Waiting for thumbnails to appear for those thousands of pictures, even if they're cached, still represents an unnecessary burden of time. Even if the thumbnails are already created, it's still a pain to interrupt the thumbnail processing to move / edit / do other stuff.

2. If it helps, the thumbnail previews on folders don't have to be the most symmetrical or aesthetically pleasing since they're only shown the 'back-end' administrative mode; it's sort of a "let me get the general gist of this folder"

3. You should add a button for "make faster"

Cheers and thanks,
Joel

19 Mar 2011, 01:49

Thanks for your suggestions. I believe they will be added to our list ...

Nick · 19 Apr 2011, 15:17

Text view, folder preview images and new caching system which makes gallery faster were added and will be released in 2.7

X3Photo Gallery Forums

Suggestions: Text View, Thumbnail on Folders, Faster Mgmt ..6 posts

Suggestions: Text View, Thumbnail on Folders, Faster Mgmt ..

Re: Suggestions: Text View, Thumbnail on Folders, Faster Mgm

Re: Suggestions: Text View, Thumbnail on Folders, Faster Mgm

Re: Suggestions: Text View, Thumbnail on Folders, Faster Mgm

Re: Suggestions: Text View, Thumbnail on Folders, Faster Mgm

Re: Suggestions: Text View, Thumbnail on Folders, Faster Mgm