Ability to just create an album without having to add any images

elrol

I would like to be able to create an album/sub-album without having to upload any images at the same time..

I was thinking it could go and be part of the Albums tab and under each listing would be an option to create a sub-album or top level parent album depending on where the user is in their album tree..

Hope this makes sense.. if you have any additional questions, please let me know.

sbillard

You can do this from the upload tab. However, you must be using the HTML based uploader, not the Flash based one.

acrylian

Additionally you of course can do that via FTP directly.

elrol

sbillard and acrylian,

I know about both of those ways.. but I was wondering if it might be better, from a users, point of view, to have the "Create a new album/subalbum" on the albums page.

look at this image : http://yfrog.com/03zpideap

I added the word (add) behind the number albums within an album.

what if the user clicked on that add link and a popup came up asking the user for the Album Title, folder name, description, etc...

I think this would allow users to set up their entire gallery easily and from the web without having to use ftp or the html browser upload page.

thoughts?

I would try to do this myself as a plugin, but I am not that good of a programmer.

thanks for the time you took to read this.. if I can be of any help, please let me know.

Thanks

elrol

sbillard

That is probably not a good place for a little used feature. I suggest you could make a plugin that attaches to the album_custom_data filters.

You can use the filter-custom_data.php script as a starting point. To create a new album you need the following code:

`$gallery = new Gallery();$album = new Album($gallery, $albumfolder);`

divan

I was going to create the same proposition - It's not always handy to use "upload" feature just to create the folder. For example, I need to create a tree of folders, 2-3 in depth - each time use "Upload" is not correct, cause these parent folders will never contain the photos, only subfolders. Moreover, it's not obvious and users easily may be confused by this.
So, it would be better to have a separate button for that.

divan

More of that, I can't create new album without uploading picture if using (default) flash mode(on 1.2.6).

sbillard

That is, of course as advertised. See my first post above. If you wan the flash based upload to be able to create folders you will have to address the `uploadify` developers.

divan

sbillard, good, I understood that uploadify cannot create the folders - but it doesn't have to. And it's actually what I'm talking about - 'upload' and 'create album' must be separate actions, and only after that, additionally, upload page should have an ability to create folders as well.

I don't want flash uploader to create folders, it's just a question of usability - flash uploader is default, and you can't create folders with it. I beleive there are a lot of people who know nothing about flash or non-flash upload - they just use what they see by default on the page. An in this default case, it's pretty uncomfortable to create folders.

And the last argument(or usage case) - the first thing I'm doing when create new gallery is building up a new folders tree. I don't care about images at this stage - I just have to prepare a lot of folders, name it correctly, and only then I'll try to upload images. With current zenphoto admin facilities it's pretty hard and take a long time.

sbillard

I guess then that the plugin route is your best approach.

elrol

Thanks Divan for your input as well and letting me know I am not the only one who has an issue with the creation of new folders/albums. I will be happy to try to create a plugin, but I do feel the developers might want to be thinking about this as well. I know this is a free product and I love it dearly.. I was just trying to bring to light a piece that could be a usability nightmare.. all that said.. i will still be sticking with ZP.. it is the best gallery product out there for my needs.. just trying to make it better :P

Thanks

acrylian

We always appreciate suggestions and also we do appreaciate contributions. We hear the first time that this is a problem as I believe most user probably use FTP to upload images (as I do, I rarely use the web upload actually).

If you or you two want to give this a try please create a ticket for this and assign it to one of your so that it is clear someone works on this.

elrol

I do not know how to use all of that.. would it be ok for me to make the pages and then email the changes to you or get them to you some other way?

acrylian

Creating a ticket is really not much harder than posting on the forum. Just create an account on our Trac page and create a new ticket. The link is on the top left of this forum.

elrol

k, I have created a ticket and assigned it to myself http://www.zenphoto.org/trac/ticket/1223

I have also attached some screen shots of some custom work i did on that ticket.. how do I get them to you for review/inclusion/etc??

Thanks

sbillard

Both of us monitor the tickets. So if all the info is there, we will see it. (Track is not behaving well at the moment, so I can't see what you have done.)

elrol

ah ok.. have a look when you have a chance.. I think this will provide a good start to this ticket that can then be refined in future releases.

Thanks

majo

I have a generic pic to use to initialize the new album...but yes next rev please add a [create new album] button. Here is the explaination for this need. We have users that are occaisionally uploading to the site as well and to keep things organized admin needs to pre-file for them. This helps avoid confusion where they need to FTP upload to.
M

sbillard

Why does the admin not just create the folder with FTP?

elrol

the average user who just wants to post images may not be familiar with FTP. Also, why should any user need to have more then a web browser to use this product.

again, i love ZP. I agree FTP makes uploading easier when adding more then say 10 photos at a time. I uploaded over 2000 images to my site in the last 3 days, and I FTP'd everyone of them. But for average users, FTP should not be needed.

sbillard

Except you said that the admin had created these folders. I presume the admin knows FTP. Besides, to quote you "This helps avoid confusion where they need to FTP upload to." That would lead me to believe that whoever "they" are they know FTP.

dlochner

Let me add another vote for creating albums without uploading new images.

It would be a nice addition to have the option to create a new album from the admin page and then be able to move images from an existing album to the new (empty) album.

Sometimes, I want to reorganize the images in albums, for example I might want to split an album in to 2 albums but not add any new images. In order to do this I need to either create a new folder using an FTP client or upload at least one new image and create the new album. Using FTP or cPanel on the host to add the folder adds unnecessary steps to album creation.

Thanks for all your efforts to make this a great program.

acrylian

well, try the nightly build that has now a button to create new albums (on top level) /subalbums (if in an album) on the album edit pages.

atstein

Awesome! I just tried this latest build and it works great. But when creating an album with two or more words "Test Album", the folder that gets created is "testalbum". Would it be possible to make it "test-album" instead, for SEO purposes?

Thanks for this update.

sbillard

This works correctly for me. Have you by chance replaced or disabled the SOE filter?

atstein

Yep, I have seo plugin activated.. I am using version 1.2.6 [4408]. I downloaded it this morning and put it on my site http://gallery.adamtstein.com . I have set up a new album called "new album" but the dir it links to is "newalbum"

Arjen

Another vote for a seperate album management option, I'm surprised no-one asked for this feature before. It was the first thing I missed when starting to use zp (I assumed it was a 'feature' to have at least one photo in each album before you can make a subalbum).

For a client, I put up zp with a one click install on Dreamhost, and I wouldn't know where they had to FTP to.

I hope this goes quickly into a release.

Thnx

Arjen

acrylian

The nightly build has already the ability to do that.