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Can I create a dynamic meta-data generated photo album and photoblog slideshow?

john.morton Member
in General support
Hi there,

I've gone and meticulously meta-data all 20,000 of my personal photos.

Now I'm able to search them all - which is great.

However, there are two things remaining which I'm REALLY looking to do;

(1) Create a dynamic photo album based on keywords and boolean combinations thereof. For example; have an album for a persons name where all the photos of them feature and another album may be; all the photos from ('2009' AND ('Thailand' OR 'London') AND 'Bird') etc. Is this possible? Maybe with a plugin?

(2) I want to have album/holiday highlights somehow that only show the BEST 100 or so images. For example, I want to have a photo blog of my recent trip to India and only show images with the keyword 'Favourite' or 'Blog' stamped into them (so, then I could as above, use the keywords ('2009' AND 'India' AND 'Blog'). The second part of this is to somehow enable photo meta-data 'captions'. So you end up with someone visiting my photos, clicking on India highlights, a manual shadowbox navigation or slideshow starts complete with photo description captions.

I know this is a lot to ask - but, I imagine programmatically posible considering the hard parts done (having the metadata present in the database! ;)

Can anyone help me on this one?

Cheers,

John

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    You can create dynamic albums from all kinds of searches. There are options on the backend what fields (title, tags, description etc.) the search should search on.
  • john.morton Member
    Arcylian,

    Thanks for your prompt response, but I find it somewhat unclear.

    I have had a quick look through the administrative backend under both 'Options > Search' and 'Options > Plugin' but nothing seems to present itself as obvious.

    I have enabled the 'filter-file_searches' plugin (as it sounds suspiciously like what I want) but am unable to interact with it currently due to the following error:

    Zenphoto Error
    MySQL Query ( SELECT `value` FROM `zp_options` WHERE `name`='filter_file_searches_albums_200109 - United Kingdom, Grasmere (Ian's 40th)'; ) failed. Error: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 's 40th)'' at line 1

    This obviously seems to indicate it doesn't like the ' character in the directory name (or it's subsequent imported entry within the ZenPhoto database somewhere).

    Is it within this plugin that I need to investigate further (having somehow sorted the directory naming issue)?

    Kind regards,

    John
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    You should read the documentation of a plugin.To create a dynamic album just do a search on the frontend. Then there is an option to create an dynamic album on the admin toolbox on the top right if your are logged in.
  • john.morton Member
    Arcylian,

    Aha! I never noticed that admin drop down menu before - and, this one VERY useful menuitem hidden away up there! In my humble opinion, it's such a useful feature it should be somehow integrated into the main administrative interface in/near Albums.

    Further, I've configured my backend search capability to treat seperate words as a logical OR operation. This works as expected. Interestingly, an uppercase AND is treated as another search term. A '&' symbol DOES return the correct boolean AND operation image results.

    Great, but - when a dynamic album is created with this '&' symbol, it then creates an ambiguous dynamic album string back in the backend dynamic album, e.g.: 'words=john & drinking&searchfields=255' (and returns only the images where words=john).

    Should this be fixed such that it becomes 'words=john&drinking&searchfields=255'?

    Or to be even clearer another delimiting symbol used in conjunction wit the &? i.e
    'words=john|drinking$searchfields=255' for an OR and
    'words=john&drinking$searchfields=255' for an AND?

    Also, is there some documentation somewhere on how I can build these customised search strings (as, they don't seem to be direcly editable; is this possible somehow - maybe via the database)?

    Ideally a full expression would be incredibly powerful; 'words=john&year=2009&country=GB&city=london|albumID=1&words=birthday' etc?

    Kind regards (and thanks for your help!),

    John
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    There is also a short tutorial on the dynamic albums: http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/09/how-to-use-the-dynamic-albums-feature/
    Then we have the function documentation itself. Also you can look at the search class

    It is not possible to have this toolbox function on the backend as the search engine is frontend only.

    Regarding the issue you mention I have to pass that to my collegue sbillard who is the main architect of the search engine stuff.
    I am not familiar with the code. It is possible to edit the search query on the edit page of the album (see below the "dynamic album search" field).

    However, it is not possibe to do queries with full expressions.
  • sbillard Member
    What version of zenphoto are you using? AND should be the boolean AND operator.

    The SQL error and ambiguous query string problems will be corrected in tonight's build.
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