Using Gallery for photo albums and inserting img in general

[newandtrying]

Hello !
I installed Serendipity 24 hours ago and have been fiddling with the possibilities of adding photo albums. That is the primary goal of this set up, a small personal site to get photos and share texts with family and friends now on 4 continents !

Basically, I just can't figure how to add several photos to an article, with clickable thumbnails, and eventually add other photos later to the same album. (I have several pictures, but not the thumbnails nor the next page feature, in short, it is just several pictures added one after the other, not the Gallery setup). I don't know how to set up the paths to the pictures, neither have I figured where I am supposed to click (or code into the article ?) when I am in the "post" interface. I have just figured that I can eventually post a whole album in one click, but how ?
Is the gallery path to pictures necessarily different from the upload path, for example ?

I've read threads and seen on a site or two that what I want to do is feasible, but I did not quite get it !

I do hope serendipity will be useful to my purpose which is to provide an easy to explain method to share albums with young and old, computer literate and computer novices. I really like the media library interface, the possibility to add pages... It seems "sturdy", it might do the trick.

The French are talkative !

Thank you much for your help.

[judebert]

While Serendipity can be used as a photo album, it's really set up for blogging. Something like Gallery might be better for your purposes.

However, Serendipity does include media management. Simply log in to your admin page and click the "Ajouter un document" button. You can upload as many images as you like from your local computer. You can also retrieve images from other webpages, although this practice is not well-received by some webmasters.

The media library is arranged like a filesystem, with folders and subfolders. I believe that the French version of this button is labeled "Administrer les dossiers". It should be grouped with the other media buttons on the admin page.

To use the images, including thumbnails or pictures, edit an entry with "Poster un billet" or "Éditer les billets". Among the buttons near the top of the entry area is "Document". This will allow you to insert a picture from the Media Library into the entry at the current location. The screens that appear guide you through choosing a picture (from a list of thumbnails), aligning it on the page, choosing the original picture or a thumbnail, whether to link it to the original size picture, and how to caption it. There are lots of options, but it's simple to choose the ones you want, and Serendipity remembers them for the next picture.

There are plugins to provide gallery operations to Serendipity, but I'm not familiar with them, I'm afraid. If you want those, someone else will certainly help you out.

I hope you enjoy your web publishing! It certainly can help to keep the family together.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Serendipity supports multiple approaches:

1. Either you create a blog article and attach multiple pictures to it, by opening the mediadatabase popup for every image you want to insert. if you later add new pictures to a directory, you will need to edit the published entry to add the new pictures. Manually, there will be no automatic publishing of new images inside.

2. You use the "User Gallery" event plugin which offers people to look inside your picture database. They will only see pictures with next/forward navigation. But no blog entries.

3. You use the serendipity "imageselectorplus" event plugin which allows you to add some XML code inside the entry. This XML code will automatically embed all pictures of the database as thumbnail strips, also when you add new images. This is a bit tricky though, but the XML code is not too hard. The plugin comes with a "documentation_en.html" file that you can view, the code that you put into your blog entires looks like:

Code: Select all

      <mediainsert>
            <gallery name="MyHolidays/" />
            <media type="gallery" />
      </mediainsert>

That would show a gallery of the directory "MyHolidays" in your media database.

HTH,
Garvin

[newandtrying]

Thank you very much to both of you. Very helpful.

I am on trying the UserGallery event plugin.

There are indeed more ways to handle the pb than I was aware. I guess an immediate pb is this : what about the paths name with this Gallery plugin ? Can the gallery folder stay unused and the paths both be set to serendipity/uploads or does the plugin use its own folder (ie, gallery)?

Here is a screen capture of the fields I am talking about :


@garvinhicking
1. Ok, the basic way.
2. This I will try this evening.
3. I'll try this one too. Sounds interesting but not for some users at beginning. (For some, it will be first blogging experience. ) Do you think I can create empty albums, code them and wait for people to load pictures into their pre-named albums (for ex, Annie's First Album, Annie's Second Album...-- and Annie will end up managing the three lines of code !)
Very useful, thanks.

@judebert
Thank you.
I am using Gallery2 for my own purpose but with their Smarty templates, I have not managed to write a decent looking menu yet !... and I want people to share text too on "one location" (make it as simple and diverse as possible... after 500 pictures of the kids...)

I guess I have missed the step to set up previous and next page between pictures in a post (I get those lengthy pages) but I suppos I'll end up finding.

See above my screen caption of Gallery plugin (but missing what I am supposed to do with it once writing a post).

Thank you again. First time around, the family blogging experience might put some new stress into the families !!
Best regards to both of you.

[garvinhicking]

Hi Rob!

So you have a path like /serendipity/uploads/albums/ice/? Then this should basically work.

Is the <mediainsert> stuff removed in the output of your entry or still there?

Regards,
Garvin

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Would you have the chance to try that on a reduced, fresh blog with fewer event plugins? Especially the entryproperties plugin with its caching could be involved...

Regards,
Garvin