More Gallery Suggestions

[AlexWright]

Right, so this may be a long topic, and one I harp on from time to time. Now that I have moved a forum away from Invision (and over to XenForo), I'll list some of the reasons of why we made that choice, and what IPS could do better, at least from my user's experience. I'll try to break this into segments so it's not too rambling.

1. Displaying Albums above the regular gallery navigation.

Doing so degrades the user experience with the software. Albums should be a way for users to categorize their uploads, but should not detract from navigational experience. Instead of displaying Albums entirely separate from the general view in categories that allow both albums and regular uploads, this should display the image grid, with items from Albums included. The album in which the image appears should be listed in the image details, allowing users to browse that specific album if they wish. In doing this, you clean up the (oft times) confusing layout of categories that allow Albums and separate image uploads.

2. Albums/image categorization in general.

A feature of a few gallery sites is to allow an image to be categorized in more than one album. For instance, if I have an image that includes multiple characters (Say, from a game, anime, movie, or other), outside of tags it is hard to have the ability to categorize that image appropriately. Several of our users had requested a way to include an image within multiple albums without having to create duplicate copies. Even if an image could be "imported" to display in another album, this would help.

3. Uploading needs to be simpler.

Yes, uploading takes a lot. Select category. Select album, no album, new album (and detail new album), upload, edit each individual file anyways for description and tags. This could potentially be streamlined by:

Upload each image.

Select Category and Album, No Album, New Album per image.

Set details while doing this (description, tags, etc).

Additionally, don't allow the uploader to be closed if the user accidentally hits escape or clicks outside of the box (sometimes a warning prompt appears before the box closes, this should be always).

 

I probably have more...but these were the big ones from the users.

[christopher-w]

Hey, we are in the process of customising the look and feel of the Gallery, so thanks for posting this.

13 hours ago, AlexWright said:

Displaying Albums above the regular gallery navigation.

Can you explain a little more about what you mean here? I've been reading your comment and viewing the gallery at the same time (4.5) and wasn't sure what you are referring to.

 

13 hours ago, AlexWright said:

Albums/image categorization in general.

A feature of a few gallery sites is to allow an image to be categorized in more than one album.

Totally agree with you there, we haven't even launched yet and this cropped up a few times during beta testing. 

 

13 hours ago, AlexWright said:

Uploading needs to be simpler.

I was thinking that Invision had done a very good job with uploads - not sure how much simpler it could be, and if you get your wish with images having the ability to reside in multiple albums, then that will add another layer of complexity (album selections) on upload. 

 

13 hours ago, AlexWright said:

Now that I have moved a forum away from Invision (and over to XenForo),

I'm a fan of Xenforo but never really got on with its image gallery. Perhaps we should take another look as we disabled it a couple of years back and maybe they've made improvements in the meantime. But,  I do prefer the way Xenforo handles videos, especially its FFmpeg transcoding. Same old story really, no one forum vendor is best in class across all the areas it caters for. 

Generally I like the Gallery app although I am not a fan of the presentation layer in general. For example, I like the lightbox integration but not that you sometimes end up on the image's page when you close the popup, whereas other times you return to the screen that was present before you clicked on the image. 

Thanks for posting.

 

Edit: One other thing to add is image uploads and file renaming. Currently if I want to prettify image names which are used by default as captions,  I have to open every image and edit the caption to hide the underlying file name which was used to generate the caption on upload. Not everybody has a naming convention for images stored on their desktop, and almost certainly not on their phones, so being able to assign a naming sequence on batch upload, or single image upload, would be a nice to have. Not a deal breaker but I can see that's lots of images on my B2B Film & TV community are going to look untidy when someone checks out the caption in the lightbox, only to find a potentially very ugly (and perhaps compromising) filename, instead of something more appropriate.

Edited April 20, 2021 by christopher-w

[AlexWright]

5 hours ago, christopher-w said:

Can you explain a little more about what you mean here? I've been reading your comment and viewing the gallery at the same time (4.5) and wasn't sure what you are referring to.

Sure. In categories where Allow Albums, but not Require Albums is set, users can upload to either an Album or not. Images that aren't added to an album display below a listing of all albums in the category. At one point, we has a category with over 400 albums and about ten thousand images outside of albums. Navigation became...awkward.

 

5 hours ago, christopher-w said:

I was thinking that Invision had done a very good job with uploads - not sure how much simpler it could be, and if you get your wish with images having the ability to reside in multiple albums, then that will add another layer of complexity (album selections) on upload. 

This is a suggestion we made to xenforo as well, but in essence:

With multiple categories, one could add a Category field above the Album field in the image above. Basically have a nice tidy form for each image being uploaded which you can select these options in.