I'm building a website that allows select users to upload images to the site. I'm wondering if there is a way to set up a moderation queue to handle what uploads are allowed to be on the server.

Basically, here's how it'd have to work:
-Normal user uploads 20 pictures
-Admin gets notified
-Admin sifts through images, removing undesirable photos from the moderation queue
-Finalizes/approves remaining pictures in normal user's album

The point behind this would be to save some server space so there aren't many redundant or any unwanted pictures on the server. Is there any way for this to get done?

Please look at the "schedule content" utility (button on the admin overview page.) You can set new images to be not published by default and you can review the list of unpublished images.

Other than that you would need to create a custom upload plugin to handle this.

The drawback to the other utility is that it shows the images in a list, rather than in thumbnails (at least an option to view by thumbnail would be better). It's not really allowing you to review the images (as it's called Review images) if you can't see a thumbnail of the images since it requires you have to have faith that the image you've selected is- in fact- the one you want to make visible or not. Which can be cumbersome if you have other users uploading images as well.

It would be perfect if there was an option to review thumbnails of the images and allow you to delete the ones you don't want off of the server, maybe have a thumbnail with a visibility checkbox and an x to delete the image.

Actually you can do exactly that directly on the theme. If you enable the flag thumbnail plugin all thumbs of unpublished image will be flagged. You can then delete or edit them via the admintoolbox.

Is there a way to add a delete option to the flag_thumbnail plugin? Because my site doesn't publish images as it's a private-use site for the company I work for and our clients, so to use the flag_thumbnail plugin will always show an exclamation mark which can be a pain (since our clients get upload rights, they will also see the unpublished flag).

Or is there even a way to convert the flag_thumbnail into being an x and allowing that to be clicked to delete the image(s) in question?

"Is there a way..." is quite the wrong question. It's code so you can do bascially everything to that plugin as we are open source but you probably need to do it yourself. Why don't you just tell your clients what that unpublished flag means? Sorry, if I don't get that details about "being a pain".

Sorry if I offended, I simply meant that the flag has alarmed clients and regardless of an FAQ and assurances that it's not bad, they continue to ask about it. That's all. Ideally there should be an option that only the admin should be able to see the flag rather than all users who are allow to upload.

If I knew PHP well enough I probably would be able to do everything on my own, but unfortunately I don't it's not in our budget for me to get someone who could do that I need so I'm asking here. (And also being a student I don't have a lot of time to learn PHP although I certainly plan to when I have more time.)

I am just looking for a simple way to queue up and filter recently uploaded images manually and remove those which do not belong on our servers.

Absolutly no offense taken, just trying to understand. I am sorry, if you neither have the budget to hire someone nor the knowledge or time to achieve that you have to stick with what is there. Since we are a free and voluntary project we can't do that for you.

If it is just the exclamation mark that is disturbing, you can change that to any image you want. Look at around line 28 in the plugin where the image is called (action.png). Just make a new image for example with a text note "unpublished" and place it within zp-core/images and call it instead of the current.

I appreciate it and do understand about the voluntary aspect. I'm just looking for help and my situation seems like it'd be a good feature, not just something one-off and useful to only myself: being able to moderate recently uploaded images by other users by viewing a page of thumbnails.

My main issue I'm being pressed for is the image moderation. I don't know, it sounds simple enough of a concept. Is there an easy way to create a query in Zenphoto to display a set number of recently uploaded thumbnails? If I could be given a starting point to show, for example, 50 recent thumbnails I could try and figure out the rest, such as adding in a delete button.

I just don't wanna break any functions and while I could follow a tutorial I'm afraid to break the system.

Well, "easy" is relative if you are not that used to PHP. You can built standard mySQL queries to get the latest images (there is a database setup pdf in the release). You will hopefully understand that we don't always can add features on request of a few. I don't remember anyone else as Zenphoto is mainly used for personal portfolio sites. You always can submit a feature request ticket but that is no guarantee if or when we will do that.

We also have the image_album_statistics plugin that contains a function to get/print the latest images. http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/plugins/_zp-extensions---image_album_statistics.php.html#functiongetImageStatistic
http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/plugins/_zp-extensions---image_album_statistics.php.html#functionprintLatestImages

But again you would have to modify that/make a custom version to get image delete buttons into it. It is all there but you would have to use the object orientated framework for that:
http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/classes/_Image.html#methoddeleteImage
http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/classes/Album.html#methoddeleteAlbum

I can work from there I guess. The image_album_statistics plugin pulls a text list only, how do you pull down recent thumbnails instead of a text list?

The printLatestImages function does print the thumbs....

Take a look at tonight's nightly build. I've enhanced the publish content utility. It may suit your needs now.

Wow, thank you so much! That is exactly what I needed. I have one concern though (which wouldn't stop me from using it as-is whatsoever): I'm testing my site with 50-60 images at the moment. Currently, the change displays every thumbnail that has been uploaded (which is all 50-60 of them), when you have site that have much larger numbers, will they all be shown at once or will they be paginated to reduce load times involved in loading the thumbnails? Just food for thought more or less.

One other thing, I was thinking about creating a folder for my uploaders to upload to by default (which I would tell them to upload to, and we'll call it "Upload queue"). Basically with this idea, those people will be told to place all images under the "Upload queue" directory. What I would then like to do is while I'm going through the uploaded images in the Publish content utility is- while also being able to "Publish", "Do not publish", and "Delete"- (maybe placed on the right hand side) be able to move to another directory with a dropdown box, which would then be the images' final resting place (so to speak). I'm thinking just a drop down box that says something like, "Move to directory..." or something, and then the dropdown lists the directory's that are available. I just think it's another way to manage files in a kind of bulk way.

Once again though, thank you very much! You've just made my day.

The queue will not be pages. If you get lots of images uploaded I guess you will just have to review the queue more often. If you do go forward with the single folder that you allow uploads to go to, I think you have what you need with the normal album/image tabs. They are paged (unless you want to do the mass edit). From there you can publish, delete and/or move images to a different album.