Related to the search feature, it would be nice to have something like the "smart folders" of iPhoto (eg. a smart folder with the keyword "new york" would show all the pictures returned by a search query on "new york"). That way, pictures would be automagically sorted when they are uploaded. While this feature can be a plus compared to other web gallery, I'm not sure if this is what zenphoto needs (I guess zen wants to remain a simple, easy to setup gallery without any complex feature - actually smart folders can be simple link with a search query in the URL).

I think this could be implemented very easily after a search with tags was done. If the search was done in the same manner at Image URLs and you could just include the search term in the URL along with any date information then, you could simply setup an album that would point to that URL.
Well, at-least it seems easy enough, it is up to trisweb and Luckyspin to decided and see how this fits in with the priorities.

Ahhhhhh... you're catching on

There's an empty stub for a "Groups" class in classes.php if you didn't notice. The original idea behind that is to allow you to make arbitrary or search-based groups of any photos or albums. This is exactly "smart folders" as iPhoto does them.

By this time, tagging should also be implemented, so each tag would have its own group with all its images, and you'd be able to see images with multiple tags, or do complex searches like "Tagged with Outdoors and Tree, but not with City, after 9/3/2005 with an Olympus camera." The results of that could be saved as a group, and any new images matching those criteria would show up in the group.

Of course, this is long-term stuff we're talking about. 2.0, 2.0. Probably a pretty big rewrite of the data model will have to happen first. But something to look forward to

Wow, sounds like you have that planned out really well! It is really cool to me to see that you will be searching EXIF data also which means that the search will be just as powerful as anything that you could get with Spotlight.

Keep up the good work Trsiweb!

I guess as a Computer Science student, I should learn PHP and start contributing to making this happen, I am more and more thrilled with ZenPhoto and how it works every day.

Or how it's theoretically someday going to work... don't get too far ahead of yourself ;-) But seriously, there's no reason we can't store common EXIF data in the DB for quick searchability and sortability (especially for dates and such). Just have to add it with the load of the image. This is definitely going to happen. The groups and interface improvements come pretty easily once we have that. And then it gets fun.

We could certainly use your help sometime in the future, especially once we start on these more complex features. Come back once you learn PHP