Photo and Video Albums

An album is a group of pictures and movies inside of a gallery. Albums can be nested inside of each other and can be customized on an individual basis. Albums can have specific permissions (ie, some users can modify it, some users can add to it, etc), and the album owner can grant permissions to different users. Albums can even be hidden to only allow logged in or specifc users access to even see that it exists.

An album's thumbnail defaults to a scaled version of the first image added but can be set to be all or part of any image in the album. Items in an album can be sorted based on date added, date captured, etc, and the whole album can be deleted, moved, or renamed. All captions for items in an album can be edited at once without having to click on each picture. Comments can also be viewed in once place for easy review and moderation. Additionally, if polling is enabled for an album, the results can be viewed by the album owner or optionally displayed at the top of the page.

Album can also be easily watermarked (watermarking every image in it) and customized by their owners in a variety of ways. You can change the title, colors, background, fonts, and borders. You can also specify a target thumbnail size and a target intermediate photo size (so that folks with lesser bandwidth can view scaled versions of big photos). The number of rows and columns in an album is customizable, as well as a variety of viewer options.

Adding Photos

If you have the appropriate permissions, you can add photos to an album. A default method is set in the config wizard, but there are several ways to do this:

• Upload a ZIP file full of photos and movies
• Use a form to upload up to 10 photos at each time with and optional file containing descriptions.
• Specify a web page and let Gallery go slurp up all the photos and movies on that page.
• Copy all images to a directory on your webserver and let Gallery copy them directly into your album.
• Use the embedded applet and drag-and-drop pictures and movies to upload them.

As you upload pictures, they will be automatically thumb nailed, added to your album, and have intermediate sized images created if needed. They can also be automatically watermarked if you have enabled this feature. Once photos are upload there are several things you can do to manage them:

• Edit the title, caption, keywords, and other custom fields that you define.
• Modify the thumbnail with java applet, selecting only part of the image to show.
• Rotate the image in increments of 90 degrees.
• Move the photo to a different place in the same album or a different album.
• Hide the photo so that only the album owner or logged in users can see it.
• Delete the photo.
• Add a watermark of your choice to your photo.

Visitor Experience

Users viewing your album can easily navigate around using the navigation bars at the top and bottom of every album page. Each album can be given its own unique URL. Each photo within the album in turn has its own unique URL. You can use these URLs to get directly to a specific photo from outside the Gallery (useful when you want to email photo links to a friend). In addition to this, the album owner can allow the user to use the following features:

• Languages - Gallery supports over 30 languages and you can choose which language you want to have and how they are presented to the user. The language can be automatically detected by Gallery from the user's browser configuration, or the user can be presented with a drop down box or pictures of flags to select a language.
• Unique, Short URLs - If your server supports mod_rewrite (a module for Apache), your albums and pictures can have short, easy to remember urls such as http://example.com/gallery/springbreak/thebeach
• Fit-to-window Images - If a visitor has a supported browser, Gallery can dynamically resize images to make them as large as possible while still fitting inside of the visitors browser window.
• Full or Resized Images - Visitors can choose if they want to see the full size images or scaled versions.
• Print Photos - Gallery supports several photo-printing services which allow visitors to order prints of pictures in your gallery.
• Keyword Searching - Visitors can search a gallery for text in Picture and Album descriptions and optional fields.
• EXIF Headers - Gallery can read information embedded in the exif headers of jpegs. Digital Cameras and some photo editing programs use these headers to store information about how and when pictures were taken or created.
• Click Counting - Gallery keeps track of how many times albums and pictures are viewed and displays them on your Gallery so that you know which items are most popular.
• Public Commenting - Visitors can comment on pictures and other visitors can view them. Logged in users with the proper permissions can delete comments and view all of them on one page.
• Polling - The owner of an album can choose to include a poll where visitors can vote on which image they think is the best, or what they think of every image. Results can be displayed at the top of the album or only to the album owner.
• Slideshow - Visitors can view the pictures and, if configured, pictures in sub albums, as either a slideshow inside of the browser window or as a full screen slideshow.
• Album Tree - A tree of all albums and sub albums with clickable links to them can be displayed on the front page of your Gallery to provide quick and easy access to all of the albums.

For more information please visit http://gallery.menalto.com/.