Is there some way to show photos in all subalbums of the current album?

dd-b

I realized I'd gotten used to this in Piwigo and kind of built my idea of site structure around it (in particular, there'd be one album for an event, and then sub-albums for each photographer shooting the event; so viewers could either see one photographer's photos, or else everybody's photo, in chronological order in either case). I don't see any setting for this (needs to be a user setting, not an admin setting, since the point is to let the user choose).

acrylian

No, not directly an option The reason is that - as far as I remember - differently to Piwigo on Zenphoto albums are physical: A folder with images (and/or subalbums) is an album. So each album is basically an entity.

The easiest for you is to create a so called dynamic album. That is a "saved search". Take a look here: https://www.zenphoto.org/news/how-to-use-the-dynamic-albums-feature/

dd-b

Yep, I'm using dynamic albums for some things (all photos by one photographer, for example, and all photos tagged as containing certain specific people).

Piwigo has both physical albums (a directory tree on disk; rooted at gallery/ in the Piwigo directory) and uploaded albums, and it supports including child albums as an option for either one. The directory tree gives a clear parent/child relationship, which I believe it abstracts and stores in the database so it can use the same code to handle both cases.

I can of course add a tag to associate all the photos I want grouped into each virtual albums, but people have no way to really navigate from the broken-down albums to the general album and back, no way really to even find that the other exists when they are in one. Plus, adding tags for each case and building virtual albums for each case is a lot of additional manual effort. (Yeah, I have looked at the inside of the .alb files; haven't tried building one by hand to see what happens, but maybe that would give me a way to automate it, or at least do something faster than clicking on a GUI?)

I need to read up on searches more; I see boolean search text briefly inserted in the GUI and then removed, and I'm wondering how much I can expand on what the GUI lets me do for virtual albums. Because another issue is that I can't seem to do "this tag and that tag" searches in a virtual album, and I think I'll need to some day.

acrylian

To navigate from subalbum to the parent themes usually have a breadcrumb navigation.

You can create everything by code using the object model. That would be rather advanced coding.

You could also build custom display using code but then you have to rebuild a lot stuff like pagination etc. that would easily go out of hand regarding overhead.