Hi, I'm Xiao, a multimedia & design student and I'm new here.
First of all, I would like to thank the great people here who made this gallery script. I was looking for a gallery script to start hosting my new photos on my 1and1.com Beginner hosting package, so I can't use ImageMagick and is stuck with GD library, with 20MB PHP memory limit.
Some of the nice features I came up is....
Central Image Generation/Stealth mode
This would for people who have to use GD Library and have low PHP memory limit like me - so got to flying below the memory radar thus the term stealth)
Have this mode on would hide all unprocessed photos and disable automatic image generation when people visit the gallery since people could easily run PHP out of memory even with few visitors. Basically you would be able to run image generation in a central place in the admin panel one by one as to not stress PHP, and any album that is finished with its generation would be flagged visible. This way you can have loads and loads of images and never run out of PHP memory because the visitor always reads from the cache.
Some enhancement might be the ability to run it all-at-once or album by album, or have the ability to set your PHP Mem (or auto-detection maybe?) to generate the images simultaneously while staying below radar.
It could also scan for new images in existing folders and group them under one category so you can update existing albums with new images easily.
Yet another idea I had is that if you have a lot of visitors with no time to run this script then you might be able to let your visitors to trigger some PHP code which checks against current time, and some data base entry (just any way of spacing out the generations of images), then generate one image. This way your visitor would "drive" the script for you. And when run out images to generate, the script should not cause any error (or even deactivate itself with some database entry?).
Personally I would be ecstatic to just be able to have a way to safely staying below memory radar while generation resized images and thumbnails.
Album Extraction
It would be real nice if you can upload a compressed file and have the ability to let ZenGallery auto-detect it and offer to extract it and make it into an album (with the option to delete the archive after extraction).
Finall some thanks..
I dunno where to post this since I don't have anything to show and tell with my test gallery being very boring, so I'll add this to the back of the post.
I tried the Gallery 2 software since it seems to be the most popular one right now. I don't want to be a hater, but man what a pain to setup and run, the thing is extremely sluggish and cluttered too.
While browsing wikipedia.org and the comparison of gallery script I spot this little gem, the difference is night and day! It took less than 15 min to setup, and I was running smooth within 30 min.
I especially love how the default theme reflect the minimalistic approach to designing this script (its my favourite out of all the bundled themes).
Now I eagerly awaits awaits the 1.1 version of the script with full Sub-Album support and Auto-Rotate Based on EXIF Info being the most anticipated feature to me.
I plan to have a trip to California and then China starting May 1st, so the release of v1.1 would be perfect for my travel photos and the (hopefully) Canon 35mm 1.4L prime lens I'm eyeing right now.
Thanks again for the wonderful gallery script, please don't drop your support of GD Library (for the little people) and keep the gallery light weight!
I'll definitely start making some theme for this gallery not far in the future, I see myself using this for a long time!
Zenphoto
Comments
First, about the "Stealth mode" you suggest - I'm not convinced this would be any better than the on-demand generation currently done... if anything, Zenphoto's current method only spreads out the load over more time, and focuses the workload on where it's desired most. It doesn't provide any real advantage to clicking a button and doing them all at once, other than speed for viewers if the image hasn't yet been processed. After processing the images are served statically, so no advantage there either.
To address that speed problem, a script could easily be created to pre-load images.
It may be a good idea to turn off image generation after pre-loading images manually if the user is extremely concerned about wasted CPU/bandwidth from processing requests... but otherwise, shouldn't be an issue.
If you're running out of PHP memory, it's not going to help changing *when* the images are processed ;-) Only how big they are, increasing the memory limit, etc. can help that.
Re: album extraction, that is a good idea, but as long as you're uploading via FTP or SFTP, why not just upload images one by one? The Zip file's true advantage is in uploading via the web, and Zenphoto already supports that. File a bug in the tracker if you think it'd be good and I'll evaluate it further.
Thanks again for your thoughtful post, I hope you enjoy Zenphoto! I'll tell you now that we'll never drop GD support, and that I'll always try to keep zenphoto simple, elegant, and lightweight.