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I'd like to settle on a consistent approach to photo galleries being displayed in Symphony sites for both client projects and my own personal photo sharing.

For client sites, these photos may need to be arranged in galleries. For my personal photo sharing, I'd also like to be able to display information such as aperture, shutter speed, ISO rating, etc.

I'm thinking that I should have a single place where galleries and their photos are uploaded and edited rather than replicating the same thing for each Symphony site, and that each Symphony site will pull in the images and their meta info from said single place.

Options I currently have in mind:

  • Piwigo gallery, Symphony accessing images via its REST API (provides XML or JSON response)
  • Gallery 3 gallery, Symphony accessing images via its REST API (provides JSON response)
  • custom Symphony installation/gallery build with the necessary sections (gallery, image) using @alpacaaa's Image Information extension (and @nickdunn's REST API extension?)

I've not done any integration like this using REST before, and I'm a bit hazy on the advantages/disadvantages of the custom Symphony installation versus using a third-party gallery. As I understand it, I would be able to control access either way.

If possible, I'd also like to be able to make certain images in the gallery for members of certain groups only, which might bring the Members extension into play, though I'm not sure how that would work when the images are coming from an external Symphony installation. It would be nice if authors could upload images from within their own Symphony site's admin rather than having to login at the gallery application, but not essential.

If anyone has any general points on pros/cons and advice on how to go about it, that would be great. Thanks.

I was looking into this situation too, in my case, it doesn't make sense to host on a server if multiple user need to browse hundreds of photos at the same time. I choose to use Flickr to manage photos upload through 3rd party script but this was not done on Symphony CMS.

Thanks @proyb2. I had considered going the "Web 2.0" way but as I'm planning on using this for a long time, self-hosting the images and retaining control of the initial data is a priority for me. One of the photographers who will hopefully be using it also wishes not to upload their images to a third-party service.

As regards replicating would it be a big issue? You can probably use something like Scaffolds to export/import the section(+ data-sources in progress) into fresh installs - would streamline user insertion of Images. + if something had to go wrong with your image site - it wouldn't take down everything else.

What about extending the uploadselectboxfield to handle folders and extend the field to iterate over each folder to render a Gallery structure of images contained within?

Am looking for a method to categorise a gallery using folders containing images but haven't yet come up with the best appproach.

depends if you want to allow editing of this gallery I guess. If you know the images will always be uploaded correctly. you could do as I suggested create gallaries using a dir-list, and images by listing image files. Then you could check and return 404 if the gallery/ablum name does not match the folder names. But its a little bit of a custom data-source

I'm a bit of a photographer and have used Symphony to build a few types of gallery/photo browsing sites and although they aren't the same thing as you're intending I've found Symphony able to handle each situation. Including one where I dumped Symphony content directly into an off-the-shelf shopping cart application.

I haven't looked into REST yet to my shame but I did hash up a few flakey but working XML feed type pages to transfer data. I hadn't been using Symphony long and as I said it was all a bit flakey but Symphony was versatile enough.

The old CSV importer extension was great for dumping hundreds of photos in, I made the file list from the command prompt (batch file) on my local machine so that part would need to be somehow transferred to Symphony, I guess that'd be like gunglien's dir-list in PHP?

My only problem has been to do with file sizes, both uploading due to host restrictions and also something that troubled me was that although JIT is very cool I think we always leave a full size file on the server even though we may only show reduced size images on the front end. I worried that the shared hosting might become bloated. Even cheap compact cameras today generate 14 megapixel images and lazy end-users don't always want to create a web friendly version.

I'd be happy to hear any solution or advice on that stuff as it troubles me every time I build any site with image upload for "members".

As for gallery/image sorting/viewing on the front-end I find Symphony + jQuery to be all that's needed. Image Information extension is great, sometimes have to help formatting a field depending on the make of camera in your XML (camera manufacturers fault) but it's easy. So, I'd vote for the Symphony option.

Am looking at @iwyg Filemanager extension along with an input field for the Gallery name and also a Parent Filed for relating sub galleries to galleries..

The reason Filemanager is great is that you can FTP the images or bulk upload the images in the section entry.

Images are an association rather than attached to the entry I think.

This makes a tree like structure for Galleries with Sub Categories very feasable in my opinion. :)

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