Hi,
I found the Files Photo Gallery recently and have installed it on a Linux virtual server. First of all, what a fabulous web application! It's trivial to install and configure, and does pretty much exactly what I want to make my photos accessible via the web. It has a very polished and mature look about it, presumably something to do with the existing X3 app. I'm hoping this can replace an ancient Perl 'Apache:Gallery' application that recent updates to Perl/mod_perl have broken possibly beyond repair! Files seems a perfect replacement and improvement so thank you for your hard work on it.
I noticed a query about protecting the gallery with username/password and how secure that may be. I'm using Apache security with LDAP authentication so don't actually need the Files user authentication option at this time. Apache authentication works for a variety of sites/location so you don't need to keep reinventing solutions for each webapp.
I do have two usage queries:
1. The first is that Files doesn't appear to follow symbolic links to other folders. I've a variety of subfolders that are being displayed normally but also have some that are symlinks. The default 'home' view shows these folders greyed out and I can't then select any subfolders. Using the tree view on the left shows the folders and all subfolders (hence it is able to follow the links) but accessing any subfolder below the symlink results in 'Invalid directory xxxxxxxx'.
I've looked at the code and it appears there is a section that uses the PHP 'filetype' function to figure what is a file and what is a directory. This returns 'link' instead of 'dir'. for symlinks to directories. However, 'isdir' is used in other places and this does return 'true' for a symbolic link that resolves to a directory. I'm not fluent with PHP so haven't quite figured out what would be needed to make this work.
2. The other query is regarding the search option; this seems to only search based on folder/filenames. It would be great if this searched on tags within the photos; it does appear this information is pulled into the cache 'json' files so the data does seem to be available to search on without having to open every image, albeit, only if you've visited that folder previously in order to populate the cache!
Can you think of any obvious workarounds for these small issues? The symlink one feels like something that could be made to work, but the search option may be beyond what you're intending for this app.
Look forward to your reply and future developments to this app.
Thanks.
Richard