Posts Tagged ‘gallery’
Piwigo Showcase reaches its first 50 galleries
The Piwigo Showcase is under active preparation. To make it short, the Showcase is a Live Piwigo Galleries Directory. Each Piwigo live gallery is shown as a screenshot, a description, some tags and a link to see the gallery in action.
I have just validated registration #50. I hope we’ll have several hundreds galleries before the end of summer 2011.
Latest additions on Piwigo Showcase
How to register ?
- either you have Piwigo 2.1+ and you install plugin Showcase Register which will prefill the registration form, see forum topic Register on Piwigo Showcase
- or you simply use Piwigo.org contact form and give your gallery address, your name, a description and some tags (keywords)
Piwigo 2.2, the makers
Read the full release notes on Piwigo.org.
I have worked on the user upload, on ImageMagick and high definition resizing options, on multisite, and on the new Batch Manager. P@t has worked on themes and languages updating system, on new versions of jQuery, GIF support on upload and has removed the Adviser Mode . rvelices has worked on automatic merge of CSS and Javascript files, on CSS sprites for icons, on renaming “category” into “album”.
ddtddt has managed the translation effort and the result is 14 new languages: Catalan by josep.torne, Íslenska (Icelandic) by Jimmy Wallster, Québecois (Quebecois) by TiOger, Latviešu (Latvian) by Aivars Baldone, Norske (Norwegian) by atlew, Slovenšcina (Slovenian) by Klemen, Slovensky (Slovak) by dodo, Svenska (Swedish) by Jonas and Jimmy Wallster, Српски (Serbian) by Ћирилица1, Українська (Ukrainian) by quest_tom, עברית (Hebrew) by Adirbiton, فارسی (Farsi) by mohammadN, ქართული (Georgian) by geomagi, 中文 (繁體) (Traditional Chinese) by chouyh. You can find a list of the other translators on my blog post about release 2.1.
Piwigo gets a new logo designed by Jimmy Wallster (who made a great customization of Piwigo on Iceland My Way and who also translated Piwigo into Icelandic and helped on Swedish). I will soon post the history of Piwigo logos on this blog.
New logo for the Piwigo project
Thank you to everybody involved in Piwigo 2.2 creation!
[Interview] Biotope.fr, photo collection on nature with Piwigo
Every week I submit Google search on “Piwigo” and recently I’ve found a nicely customized Piwigo photo gallery on biotope.fr.
Biotope.fr photo collection
Nicolas Sourgens, webmaster of biotope.fr, has accepted to answer my questions for an interview related to their use of Piwigo.
At Biotope, 2 people are responsible for the photo collection:
– Nicolas Sourgens, graphical designer and web developer, has installed Piwigo and customized it depending on user requests
– Germain Tavan, who has a naturalist wildlife & flora educational background, manages colors on photos and fills the gallery
What is the mission of biotope.fr? Who is the target audience?
Biotope is composed of 16 offices on Environmental Studies, an R&D office, an international service and an agency for communication and publishing which is responsible for enhancing the Biotope photo collection.
Piwigo allows us to present our 20 years of photographic work mainly focused on wildlife, flora, habitats, natural landscapes and human activities in nature via our photo collection on the web.
The target audience is composed of both public and private organizations in relationship with the environment, but also individuals in search of beautiful pictures or rare photographs.
Since when do you use Piwigo and how did you discover it?
For 2 years. Discovered on a search engine.
What were you looking for? a “photo gallery”? a “photo database”? Did you have “opensource” in your search criteria? if yes, was it for the price or the freedom?
We were looking for an opensource software to create a photo database. We wanted to work with an opensource software because we wanted to adapt it to our own needs and for a reasonnable price!
How do you add photos?
On Mac, we resize photos and generate thumbnails with several freewares. Then we upload it with Filezilla (FTP transfer) in the “galleries” directory.
What are your favorite features in Piwigo?
* a true embedded search engine
* the ability to manage photos in a batch (we mainly use the “unit mode”)
* EXIF display
* the significant amount of functionalities thanks to plugins and tools
* RSS feed
* the ability to customize it
What improvements are you expecting?
* the ability to sell photos directly in Piwigo (with a shopping cart, provided as a plugin)
* a smarter search engine: ability to detect and correct typos
* an easier customization
A plugin “PayPal Shopping Cart” was released recently. With this plugin you can basically sell your photos from your Piwigo photo gallery. This kind of feature better integrated in Piwigo is on the roadmap, but probably not in 2011.
Which plugins are you using and which ones are the most important?
* important: Additional Pages, Advanced Menu Manager, LocalFiles Editor, PWG Stuffs, FCK Editor, Statistics
* less important: ConcoursPhoto, Contact Form
Which customizations did you implement?
We have created a template-extension to add the photo identifier next to the photo title displayed just above the photo. We use this identifier when we receive requests for detail information about a photo. Piwigo community forums helped us a lot to achieve this specific customization.
We forbid right click on photos thanks to LocalFiles Editor (even if we know it’s not 100% safe, it makes obvious we don’t want our photos to be copied)
The pagination bar (first|previous[1,2,3|next|last) is duplicated: we display it before and after thumbnails (we have created another template-extension with LocalFiles Editor)
We changed the code so that thumbnails long captions are not truncated.
We have added a specific page banner.
Biotope.fr photo collection banner
We designed a welcome picture displayed into a Personal Block with PWG Stuffs plugin.
Biotope.fr Welcome Picture
We changed the message in the footer to include our copyright (directly modified footer.tpl template)
Biotope.fr photo collection footer (specific copyright)
We have created a sales quote request form thanks to Additional Pages plugin
Biotope.fr, list of Additional Pages
We have merged sections “Menu” and “Specials” in the menubar, thanks to LocalFiles Editor plugin.
We have removed the connexion section in the menubar.
We have removed the “quick search” box to keep only the “advanced search”.
… and so on.
How many photos in your collection currently? How many in the future?
We currently have more than 3,000 photographs. During 2011, we plan to add approximately 10,000 other photos from our digital stock.
We will scan our analog photographs the next years and add them into the photo collection of our website, approximately 10,000 photos.
You still use Piwigo 2.0, why don’t you upgrade to version 2.1?
We fear to loose some of our customizations… more seriously, we have to do it… and we have already installed the Piwigo AutoUpgrade plugin.
Concerning customization, you have modified the Sylvia theme. Starting from Piwigo 2.1, it is much easier to create a new theme based on another one, for example you can create a theme “biotope” based on “Sylvia” and only modify a few CSS rules and background pictures.
Thank you Nicolas and Germain and good luck to biotope.fr!
[Interview] Peter Reiser, Sam.agentur and Piwigo
Here is the first interview I publish. Peter Reiser is a Managing Partner at Sam.agentur, a web agency based in Neu-Ulm, Germany. Peter Reiser works with Jochen Roth, who made many tests and feedbacks on EXIF/IPTC support in Piwigo. Peter uses Piwigo for his own photo gallery about the city of Neu-Ulm, integrated inside a Typo3 CMS. Sam.agentur has also implemented Piwigo for its customers.
Personal photo gallery by Peter Reiser, powered by Piwigo
How did you discover Piwigo?
We have used Piwigo for many years (even when its name was PhpWebGallery). In 2005 our customers asked for a picture database solution. Our engineering team searched for an open source programm and found PhpWebGallery.
For customers like Kardex, a warehousing and storage solutions povider, we relaunched the picture database with the new version of Piwigo. For the launch of LaCordée Reisen, a Travel Agency for German people visiting France, we also installed the new version of Piwigo.
Kardex uses Piwigo as a picture database in the intranet to offer pictures to the local marketing in the countries. LaCordée Reisen offers his Salespartners pictures for their own marketing.
How do you add photos?
Our customers upload with pLoader. In the past per FTP.
For my own photo gallery, I upload with the Piwigo Plugin of Adobe Lightroom because this ensures the best implementation of all processes in my photographer workflow.
Why don’t you use photo gallery module available for Typo3?
Typo3 is a very good tool. We produce very complex and big websites with typo3. But the features of picture gallery extensions never fit with a picture database like Piwigo.
Piwigo offers a wide range of functions and features for professional picture database which fits with the needs of photographers and marketing.
What will be good new features?
If a plugin will be programmed which mirrors the piwigo database into the typo3 database by taking the catergory-tree and a limitation of the picture size. That will be great.
What will you add to your ulm picture database?
With my database with ulm pictures i look the next week for plugins which enable me to do my sellings of ulm pictures more and more with piwigo.
What are you favorite features in Piwigo?
To make individual settings to different users. I use this to deliver a preview of a shooting to my customer or model.
What are the most useful plugins?
Useful: Piwigo AutoUpgrade, RV Sitemap, LocalFiles Editor, Download Multi, IPTC from Mac.
It would be nice that Contact Form let you add custom fields.
Next steps with Piwigo?
I will test some new features like PayPal Shopping Cart and the “welcome page” in the latest version of Additional Pages plugin, etc.
It is also possible that we install 2 databases the next time. On will be for a customer which has to offer productpictures to his salespartners.
One datebase will be for our agency do offer a sevice for our customers which are booking us as photographers.
Thank you very much Peter!
3 new demos for Piwigo
One major criticism we receive about the presentation of Piwigo on Piwigo.com, is that you can’t clearly see what can be customized. It is unfortunate because the ability to make each Piwigo gallery unique is one of our key features! So instead of a single demo we now have 4 demos: in addition to the basic demo where you can switch from one theme to another, we have 3 “customized” demos. You can see them all on the new page for demos.
First new demo, homepage and theme Stripped
In the first new demo, we have used the theme Stripped, which has a fixed width and a 1 clic show/hide menu. This theme doesn’t show the album descriptions next to the album thumbnail so that you can see many albums at once. Plugin Additional Pages was used to create the homepage and we used the nice Zapfino font to create an elegant image banner.
Second new demo, theme "dark" and panoramic photo as banner
In the second new demo, we used the theme dark, which has an elastic width (automatically stretched to fit the width of your web browser) and always displays the menubar on the left. We used a panoramic photo as banner: you will need a very large screen to see where it ends. We have added a “welcome” message thanks to PWG Stuffs plugin and a detailed “About this gallery” page thanks to Additional Pages plugin. We also used the Lightbox plugin to hide details when displaying the “web size” photo.
Third new demo, theme Gally Graphite and big thumbnails
In the third new demo, we used the theme Gally Graphite (elastic width, 1 clic to show/hide menu) which offers a very “dynamic” display of your photos. We’ve decided to have big thumbnails, ie 250 pixels wide. Just like in demo2, PWG Stuffs plugin displays a welcome message.
We will add some other demos in the future, but for now it already shows you can get some different results depending on the theme, plugins and customization options you choose.
Piwigo 2.2 Release Candidate 3 and User Upload
This should be the last Release Candidate before 2.2.0. You can read full details on the forum announcement (includes the magic download link).
The User Upload feature is removed from Piwigo 2.2 default features. This is a design choice. The Community plugin is now responsible for this feature. Starting from version 2.2.a, the Community plugin is not bound to pLoader anymore: now you can activate the advanced upload form for users as well. Of course, users will also be able to add photos with remote softwares like pLoader, Jiwigo, Lightroom, Shotwell, Digikam…
The Community plugin doesn’t imply full trust anymore: you can say that photos added by Friends (the group) needs to be validated by an admin, while photos added by Paul (the user) are directly visible in the gallery. You can also give the right to create sub-albums.
1. the administrator creates upload permissions by answering following questions:
* who? any visitor, any registered user, a user, a group
* where? the whole gallery or a specific album
* level of trust? high (immediate visibility in the gallery) or low (photos needs to be validated)
Manage Upload Permissions
2. if at least one permission matches the current user, a link [i]Upload photos[/i] is added in the menu. This is the upload form, as full featured as it is in the administration panel: automatic resize, thumbnail creation, automatic rotation, several photos at once, progress bar…
User Upload Web Form
If the user has a low level of trust for this album, photos are now pending for validation. Administrators are notified by email.
User Upload Web Form, 4 photos uploaded
3. administrators open the pending photos screen and decide which photos to validate and which to reject. Admins can also edit photos and albums before validation.
Pending Photos in Administration Panel
Community plugin version 2.2.a is ready for your beta test. First step is to run a Piwigo 2.2.0RC3 then you can install the Community plugin from the plugin manager as usual.
Improvements on Additionnal Pages
Plugin Additional Pages is getting more user friendly. This is the kind of improvement I really like! First, let’s remind what Additional Pages is : this is a plugin for Piwigo to add pages with free content. Example of use: introducing yourself or talking about your photography business (activity and prices). With Additional Pages, Piwigo gets basic CMS features. P@t has released many improvements this week:
- nicer URL pattern : /page/my-business instead of /additional_page/12
- option to set a page as homepage and hide the index.php?/page/my-business in the URL when it’s homepage
- the administration screens are simpler to use (less fields and checkboxes)
Additional Pages is one of the most translated plugin, with 16 languages.
Create a new page, advanced editing options are provided by plugin FCK Editor
On the manage screen, you can sort your pages, edit or delete them
On the gallery, a new block appears in the menu
Here is an example of page for the demo
To install Additional Pages plugin on your Piwigo photo gallery, go to screen [Administration > Plugins > Manage > Other plugins available] and click on “install” in the Additionnal Pages box.
Pierrick on Piwigo 