DIY photo gallery on /beta/

rjlov · 29th December 2005, 07:07 PM

Hi everyone.

We're trialling some new photo gallery functionality on /beta, and we're interested in comments you may have.

NOTE: The user interface for this is only on /beta. However, any websites that you are hosting in your file storage will be affected (but only for the directories that you modify using the new UI).

To give it a go:
- make sure you have a file storage directory which contains photos, and is web accessible
- get rid of any index.html in that directory (rename it if you think you might want it back later)
- Go to the Action menu, and select "View as photos" and then click "Do"

You should now see thumbnails for all the images in that directory, and you can enter comments for each file. (If your images already have the EXIF UserComment tag, then you can just leave the comments blank.)

(This screen currently works best when you only have photos, and no other types of files, but it doesn't do anything antisocial if you do have other files.)

Now when you visit that directory as a website, you should see a list of all the photos as thumbnails, with links to the individual images.

If you put a file 'picture.css' into the directory, then that will be used instead of our default CSS when viewing the individual image pages.

I'm not very skilled at using CSS, so it's very possible that you'll be able to come up with much nicer pages than I have. (I haven't even tried to do anything with colours.) I'd be very interested to see any sexier versions of the image page. If the html should be different to do the things you want to, then let me know about that too.

If you don't like it, you can just go back into the Files screen and select "View as files" from the Action menu, and click "Do".

Um, I think that's all. Have fun!

Richard.

robmueller · 29th December 2005, 08:13 PM

Ooops, I've had to momentarily disable this. I was just doing some testing myself and managed to chew up a LOT of bw very quickly (190M+) when just switching to photo mode. I think that it's logging BW used when generating the thumbnails for the folder and all sub-folders so I'll have to check with Richard about this, but it seems he's gone to bed now

Sorry about that folks, should be back tomorrow sometime...

Rob

rjlov · 1st January 2006, 08:23 PM

OK, this should be working now.

Sorry about the delay, I was involved with some extended New Year's activities, and wasn't near the computer to fix it!

Cheers,
Richard.

FMRocks · 2nd January 2006, 05:15 AM

Wow, this is a great idea. I'll give it a go when I can find some extra time, and let you know how it goes.

hadaso · 2nd January 2006, 06:25 AM

Nice work!

One thing that's missing right now is a link from individual photo view bsck to the gallery (folder).

Another thing: A way to customize (such as user supplied css. Perhaps more.) I put in some Herbrew text. The encoding is Unicode and at first there was no problem displaying the text when it was only Hebrew. Then I put punctuation at the end (which is the left side) and it was displayed on the right side. Being able to add rtl directionality to the text using custom css might solve this.

However, once I put the punctuation (!) at the end of a comment strange things happened. After clicking "update" the text was changed to some garbled form, and then when clicking "update" again it changed into another garbled form, that then seemed to remain stable with more clicks on "update".

**Sherry** · 2nd January 2006, 07:33 AM

Hi Richard,

Thanks! This gallery idea is great. I put a few of my stylesheets there to see how it works. I noticed just a few things. I numbered them in case you want to respond to one or two of them.

1. Would it be possible to make the default Large instead of small?

2. I, personally, would prefer to not have the actual file name set as the title in the full picture view. I give them abbreviated names for my own use. Instead could it be just blank or have the comment there instead of the bottom (in the full view)?

3. Sorry to say this but the full view picture you get when clicking on the thumbnail is pretty bad. I opened the .png separately and put the enlarged thumbnail side by side and the FM one is blurry.

4. This may only be happening on the beta but I noticed the quota was at 418k after I uploaded the .png files. After turning on the gallery it changed to 342k. If you compress them maybe that's why they are degrading?

5. I usually set web sites to files only. (didn't work) You might want to be sure to put the need to set as Files & Directories in your documented use of the feature. (you may have already planned to do that but, while it was on my mind, I thought I'd mention it).

Sherry

eggman · 2nd January 2006, 10:38 AM

Looks good apart from the css and the fact that the photos are a little blury and too large as Sherry pointed out.

Thanks richard!

rjlov · 2nd January 2006, 02:29 PM

Hiya.

hadaso:

I intend to make it so that the gallery will look for a gallery.css in that directory, but I haven't actually done that yet!

I'll add a link on the image page back to the directory, and I'll see if I can figure out what's going on with the garbled stuff.

Sherry:

1. Maybe we should have a cookie that remembers whether it should display large or small thumbnails?

2. I wasn't really sure what to do about filenames. Maybe we shouldn't display them unless there's no comment, and also no EXIF comment.

3. I'm not 100% what the problem is with image quality without seeing the images that are causing problems, but here is what happens:
- we scale the images on the server, so that they're a little bit bigger than your screen (actually we just pick the next largest out of a set of predefined image sizes )
- then we ask your browser to scale the image again so that the page fits just perfickly (sic) into your browser window.

This means you can upload large pictures, and they don't take forever to download, and they don't use up too much of your bandwidth, as long as the people viewing them are not using enormous screens.

However, the fact that the image has been resized twice will degrade it somewhat. It might be possible to improve the server-side scaling to produce better raw material for the browser - I'll investigate that.

4. Dunno about this. I'll look into it.

5. Ah yes. We had considered adding a completely new option for a web site (Photo Gallery). This would work for the whole website rather than per directory. If we did this, then the "View as files" / "View as photos" setting in the file storage screen would only be your own benefit, and wouldn't affect the web site as presented to the public. Do you reckon that would be a good idea?

Richard.

**Sherry** · 2nd January 2006, 04:21 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by rjlov
1. Maybe we should have a cookie that remembers whether it should display large or small thumbnails?

I was thinking more of the person you give the link to. They wouldn't have a cookie.

I'll leave it up to others for the default small or large. I wouldn't be using it as a real photo gallery as others would so their opinion would be better than mine.

Quote:

2. I wasn't really sure what to do about filenames. Maybe we shouldn't display them unless there's no comment, and also no EXIF comment.

Pernonally, with no comment I'd prefer them blank. I also have no idea what EXIF is so I don't know if I have it.

Quote:

3. I'm not 100% what the problem is with image quality without seeing the images that are causing problems, but here is what happens: <smip>

The shot on the left is yours. It may look extra blurry because of the typing in it. Regular pictures may not look as bad. Notice the typing in the action, folder names, size and resouces.
http://Sherry.url123.com/fmstylephoto

Quote:

5. Ah yes. We had considered adding a completely new option for a web site (Photo Gallery). This would work for the whole website rather than per directory. If we did this, then the "View as files" / "View as photos" setting in the file storage screen would only be your own benefit, and wouldn't affect the web site as presented to the public. Do you reckon that would be a good idea?

I'm not running a web site so again it's probably best for others to give their opinion. I only brought it up so, as it is now, it would be included in the docs or others could comment on how it would affect them.

Sherry

ewal · 3rd January 2006, 05:05 AM

Hi Richard

Great addition, looks good!

I have only spent a short while on the fastmail gallery implementation, thought I would add the following comments at this stage.

a. It would be helpful if one is on a particular image if an 'up' link could be provided. Basically taking one back to the thumbnails rather then having to 'back' or 'previous' until one gets to the start. (alternatively/in addition see f below.)

b. Toggle EXIF data would be great. (for the photographers amongst us).

c. Provide optional 'title' comments field. (This is mom being silly on our beach holiday!). Alt text as well?

d. Screen resolution choice. Default, or absolute (800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864), or relative (50%, 100%) etc. (there were some pictures I had which were small and I would have preferred them bigger in a gallery even if the resultant resolution was poor).

e. Different user choice styles/layouts. Maybe that will be achieved via gallery.css? However have a look at JAlbum for some examples of what I mean.

f. In any event it would be nice if the thumbnails could be displayed on all screens (say horizontally at the top) with the actual picture in the main screen portion.

g. Slideshow?

h. I found the implementation of the Do action files/photos a bit confusing. If one is defining it within the parent level folder the Do action did not seem to do anything. Seems that one needs to be in the actual folder then select all and Do action/photos. Let me know if you do not understand this comment.

Edward

Abydos · 3rd January 2006, 06:54 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by ewal
c. Provide optional 'title' comments field. (This is mom being silly on our beach holiday!).

I'd very much like to see the above feature too. Maybe the file name could be used as a title appearing above the photo & have the comments field appear below?

It's looking very good & I don't want to suggest anything that would involve a lot of re-writing but would it be possible to include an option allowing the thumbnail view to be either horizontal or vertical. Horizontal is good for galleries but vertical would open up this photo gallery feature for use as a personal blog site as well.

[Possible glitches]
I'm getting some odd behavior when clicking on a thumbnail... It switches to 'slideshow' view but the image is initially tiny. Then in slideshow, selecting a different size opens up just the image without any of the up/next links.

Wilas · 3rd January 2006, 11:05 PM

The photo gallery functionality is great and convinces me of the advantages of the file space even more (WebDAV access is very cool).

BUT...
to make the use of the file space reasonable for photos you would need 1GB of space. At the present pricing structure that would cost 150 USD! It's very regretable that only the space limitation is preventing the use of a sensible use of the file space - IMHO the great development efforts of the FM-Team (such as the photo gallery) may not be used (enough) just because of this limitation.

Maybe the FM-team can think about changing the pricing structure for at least the file space - prices for webspace have fallen considerably everywhere. Can FM keep up with the pace? I hope so!

Cheers
Wilas

ewal · 3rd January 2006, 11:50 PM

Hi Wilas

Just voicing my opinion here if I may?

I think that Fastmail providing such user friendly features as a photo gallery is a nice touch and makes me feel I want to stick around with Fastmail for their core feature of providing an email service. However I don't personally feel that fastmail should have such 'nice' extra features becoming a core part of their service as would be implied by increasing the filespace to 1gb as you suggest.

Certainly on-line file storage has come down in price a great deal recently but I don't see fastmail needing to be competitive here. In fact I think that if someone has a need for 1gb for photos they should look at a dedicated hosting plan which will offer far more than Fastmail could hope to or want to offer. For instance I use a hosting company that charges approx US$100 pa for 5gb storage and 75gb pm bandwidth (unlimited domains, subdomains, databases, ftp accounts etc).

Edward

Abydos · 4th January 2006, 12:15 AM

I kinda agree too.

I see this feature as an alternative way to share snaps that you might have email-ed to groups of friends. A nice new feature for an innovative email service like fastmail.

Reduce the size of your photo's to something reasonable before uploading them & these galleries don't have to eat up a lot of space.

As Ewal points out, there are lots of dedicated photo album services offering enough space to store large photo's in large permanent galleries.

Richard

hadaso · 4th January 2006, 06:08 AM

Shall I say "I agree"?!

I don't think FastMail should become a Photo gallery host. There are good providers of such services, and Fastmail should not compete with them. That doesn't mean that a basic photo gallery is not a good idea. Just that it should be something that complements email communications. (I just realized that this new gallery feature actually shows the pictures in the "attach from filespace" screen: what a great way to decide which photos to attach to a message!)

Just increasing Storage capacity or redicing the price of storage wuld not be enough to support large galleries. Lots of bandwidth would also be needed.

But I also agree that the price structure of the extra storage quota needs to be updated. Right now it looks too high in comparison to the "basic" quota included in full or enhanced accounts. If you want an extra 2GB storage it would be more sensible to get another enhanced account and share folders between the two accounts (that is for email storage. File storage prices are more in line with the "cost" of the "basic" storage, and AFAIK there is no sharing mechanism offered for file storage). But at these prices, if you just want to store backups online it makes sense to go back to the old method of storing files as attachments in email that some of us used before the file storage space was available.

29th December 2005, 07:07 PM	#1
rjlov Essential Contributor Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 282 Representative of: Fastmail.FM	DIY photo gallery on /beta/ Hi everyone. We're trialling some new photo gallery functionality on /beta, and we're interested in comments you may have. NOTE: The user interface for this is only on /beta. However, any websites that you are hosting in your file storage will be affected (but only for the directories that you modify using the new UI). To give it a go: - make sure you have a file storage directory which contains photos, and is web accessible - get rid of any index.html in that directory (rename it if you think you might want it back later) - Go to the Action menu, and select "View as photos" and then click "Do" You should now see thumbnails for all the images in that directory, and you can enter comments for each file. (If your images already have the EXIF UserComment tag, then you can just leave the comments blank.) (This screen currently works best when you only have photos, and no other types of files, but it doesn't do anything antisocial if you do have other files.) Now when you visit that directory as a website, you should see a list of all the photos as thumbnails, with links to the individual images. If you put a file 'picture.css' into the directory, then that will be used instead of our default CSS when viewing the individual image pages. I'm not very skilled at using CSS, so it's very possible that you'll be able to come up with much nicer pages than I have. (I haven't even tried to do anything with colours.) I'd be very interested to see any sexier versions of the image page. If the html should be different to do the things you want to, then let me know about that too. If you don't like it, you can just go back into the Files screen and select "View as files" from the Action menu, and click "Do". Um, I think that's all. Have fun! Richard.

29th December 2005, 08:13 PM	#2
robmueller Intergalactic Postmaster Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 6,098 Representative of: Fastmail.FM	Ooops, I've had to momentarily disable this. I was just doing some testing myself and managed to chew up a LOT of bw very quickly (190M+) when just switching to photo mode. I think that it's logging BW used when generating the thumbnails for the folder and all sub-folders so I'll have to check with Richard about this, but it seems he's gone to bed now Sorry about that folks, should be back tomorrow sometime... Rob

1st January 2006, 08:23 PM	#3
rjlov Essential Contributor Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 282 Representative of: Fastmail.FM	OK, this should be working now. Sorry about the delay, I was involved with some extended New Year's activities, and wasn't near the computer to fix it! Cheers, Richard.

2nd January 2006, 05:15 AM	#4
FMRocks The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: FM does NOT refer to Fastmail (anymore). Posts: 4,034	Wow, this is a great idea. I'll give it a go when I can find some extra time, and let you know how it goes.

2nd January 2006, 06:25 AM	#5
hadaso The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Holon, Israel. Posts: 4,484	Nice work! One thing that's missing right now is a link from individual photo view bsck to the gallery (folder). Another thing: A way to customize (such as user supplied css. Perhaps more.) I put in some Herbrew text. The encoding is Unicode and at first there was no problem displaying the text when it was only Hebrew. Then I put punctuation at the end (which is the left side) and it was displayed on the right side. Being able to add rtl directionality to the text using custom css might solve this. However, once I put the punctuation (!) at the end of a comment strange things happened. After clicking "update" the text was changed to some garbled form, and then when clicking "update" again it changed into another garbled form, that then seemed to remain stable with more clicks on "update".

2nd January 2006, 07:33 AM	#6
Sherry Moderator Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: USA Posts: 8,686	Hi Richard, Thanks! This gallery idea is great. I put a few of my stylesheets there to see how it works. I noticed just a few things. I numbered them in case you want to respond to one or two of them. 1. Would it be possible to make the default Large instead of small? 2. I, personally, would prefer to not have the actual file name set as the title in the full picture view. I give them abbreviated names for my own use. Instead could it be just blank or have the comment there instead of the bottom (in the full view)? 3. Sorry to say this but the full view picture you get when clicking on the thumbnail is pretty bad. I opened the .png separately and put the enlarged thumbnail side by side and the FM one is blurry. 4. This may only be happening on the beta but I noticed the quota was at 418k after I uploaded the .png files. After turning on the gallery it changed to 342k. If you compress them maybe that's why they are degrading? 5. I usually set web sites to files only. (didn't work) You might want to be sure to put the need to set as Files & Directories in your documented use of the feature. (you may have already planned to do that but, while it was on my mind, I thought I'd mention it). Sherry

2nd January 2006, 10:38 AM	#7
eggman Essential Contributor Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: AU Posts: 468	Looks good apart from the css and the fact that the photos are a little blury and too large as Sherry pointed out. Thanks richard!

2nd January 2006, 02:29 PM	#8
rjlov Essential Contributor Join Date: Aug 2003 Location: Melbourne, Australia Posts: 282 Representative of: Fastmail.FM	Hiya. hadaso: I intend to make it so that the gallery will look for a gallery.css in that directory, but I haven't actually done that yet! I'll add a link on the image page back to the directory, and I'll see if I can figure out what's going on with the garbled stuff. Sherry: 1. Maybe we should have a cookie that remembers whether it should display large or small thumbnails? 2. I wasn't really sure what to do about filenames. Maybe we shouldn't display them unless there's no comment, and also no EXIF comment. 3. I'm not 100% what the problem is with image quality without seeing the images that are causing problems, but here is what happens: - we scale the images on the server, so that they're a little bit bigger than your screen (actually we just pick the next largest out of a set of predefined image sizes ) - then we ask your browser to scale the image again so that the page fits just perfickly (sic) into your browser window. This means you can upload large pictures, and they don't take forever to download, and they don't use up too much of your bandwidth, as long as the people viewing them are not using enormous screens. However, the fact that the image has been resized twice will degrade it somewhat. It might be possible to improve the server-side scaling to produce better raw material for the browser - I'll investigate that. 4. Dunno about this. I'll look into it. 5. Ah yes. We had considered adding a completely new option for a web site (Photo Gallery). This would work for the whole website rather than per directory. If we did this, then the "View as files" / "View as photos" setting in the file storage screen would only be your own benefit, and wouldn't affect the web site as presented to the public. Do you reckon that would be a good idea? Richard.

3rd January 2006, 05:05 AM	#10
ewal Master of the @ Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: London, UK Posts: 1,257	Hi Richard Great addition, looks good! I have only spent a short while on the fastmail gallery implementation, thought I would add the following comments at this stage. a. It would be helpful if one is on a particular image if an 'up' link could be provided. Basically taking one back to the thumbnails rather then having to 'back' or 'previous' until one gets to the start. (alternatively/in addition see f below.) b. Toggle EXIF data would be great. (for the photographers amongst us). c. Provide optional 'title' comments field. (This is mom being silly on our beach holiday!). Alt text as well? d. Screen resolution choice. Default, or absolute (800x600, 1024x768, 1152x864), or relative (50%, 100%) etc. (there were some pictures I had which were small and I would have preferred them bigger in a gallery even if the resultant resolution was poor). e. Different user choice styles/layouts. Maybe that will be achieved via gallery.css? However have a look at JAlbum for some examples of what I mean. f. In any event it would be nice if the thumbnails could be displayed on all screens (say horizontally at the top) with the actual picture in the main screen portion. g. Slideshow? h. I found the implementation of the Do action files/photos a bit confusing. If one is defining it within the parent level folder the Do action did not seem to do anything. Seems that one needs to be in the actual folder then select all and Do action/photos. Let me know if you do not understand this comment. Edward

3rd January 2006, 11:05 PM	#12
Wilas Member Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Vienna, Austria Posts: 56	The photo gallery functionality is great and convinces me of the advantages of the file space even more (WebDAV access is very cool). BUT... to make the use of the file space reasonable for photos you would need 1GB of space. At the present pricing structure that would cost 150 USD! It's very regretable that only the space limitation is preventing the use of a sensible use of the file space - IMHO the great development efforts of the FM-Team (such as the photo gallery) may not be used (enough) just because of this limitation. Maybe the FM-team can think about changing the pricing structure for at least the file space - prices for webspace have fallen considerably everywhere. Can FM keep up with the pace? I hope so! Cheers Wilas

3rd January 2006, 11:50 PM	#13
ewal Master of the @ Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: London, UK Posts: 1,257	Hi Wilas Just voicing my opinion here if I may? I think that Fastmail providing such user friendly features as a photo gallery is a nice touch and makes me feel I want to stick around with Fastmail for their core feature of providing an email service. However I don't personally feel that fastmail should have such 'nice' extra features becoming a core part of their service as would be implied by increasing the filespace to 1gb as you suggest. Certainly on-line file storage has come down in price a great deal recently but I don't see fastmail needing to be competitive here. In fact I think that if someone has a need for 1gb for photos they should look at a dedicated hosting plan which will offer far more than Fastmail could hope to or want to offer. For instance I use a hosting company that charges approx US$100 pa for 5gb storage and 75gb pm bandwidth (unlimited domains, subdomains, databases, ftp accounts etc). Edward

4th January 2006, 12:15 AM	#14
Abydos Essential Contributor Join Date: Jan 2005 Location: UK Posts: 284	I kinda agree too. I see this feature as an alternative way to share snaps that you might have email-ed to groups of friends. A nice new feature for an innovative email service like fastmail. Reduce the size of your photo's to something reasonable before uploading them & these galleries don't have to eat up a lot of space. As Ewal points out, there are lots of dedicated photo album services offering enough space to store large photo's in large permanent galleries. Richard

4th January 2006, 06:08 AM	#15
hadaso The "e" in e-mail Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Holon, Israel. Posts: 4,484	Shall I say "I agree"?! I don't think FastMail should become a Photo gallery host. There are good providers of such services, and Fastmail should not compete with them. That doesn't mean that a basic photo gallery is not a good idea. Just that it should be something that complements email communications. (I just realized that this new gallery feature actually shows the pictures in the "attach from filespace" screen: what a great way to decide which photos to attach to a message!) Just increasing Storage capacity or redicing the price of storage wuld not be enough to support large galleries. Lots of bandwidth would also be needed. But I also agree that the price structure of the extra storage quota needs to be updated. Right now it looks too high in comparison to the "basic" quota included in full or enhanced accounts. If you want an extra 2GB storage it would be more sensible to get another enhanced account and share folders between the two accounts (that is for email storage. File storage prices are more in line with the "cost" of the "basic" storage, and AFAIK there is no sharing mechanism offered for file storage). But at these prices, if you just want to store backups online it makes sense to go back to the old method of storing files as attachments in email that some of us used before the file storage space was available.