I Love It. I Hate It. I Love It ...

pete

pete

Brassica Oleracea
Staff member
Administrator
I have an issue on my website's gallery. Take a peek. You might not be able to immediately spot it. It's actually the lack of something.

Across the top of the page, there are page numbers. That's great. Unfortunately, it's a tad difficult to remember if I've got Orsi on page 4 or 5. I therefore wanted to add a menu bar to the top of the page.

I played around with framesets for about an hour or so (a frameset is simply a way of displaying two or more webpages on a single page). I didn't like how it looked, so I decided to tackle the actual code of the gallery software I use.

Gallery 3 uses PHP for just about everything. I'm not a PHP coder, but I've been able to do simple things like put a little banner on a page. I've done that here a few times and it was pretty darn simple. So I tried with Gallery 3. And failed. Repeatedly.

On each fail, I went back to the documentation for Gallery 3. Unfortunately, some of the examples on how to do what I was doing were on websites that no longer exist. That meant trying to make up a bunch of stuff on the fly. I wasn't very successful at that. I then tried going over the documentation for the Gallery 3 theme (read: the bits of code that make everything look the way it does) I was using and that didn't help. *Sigh*

2 and 1/2 hours later, I was just about to give up and start using another gallery software when I randomly clicked on a link on the support website. It was a once sentence answer and told me EXACTLY where to enter the code I wanted. And it's easy.

So, I love Gallery 3 again. However, I've threatened it with Piwigo, so it had better behave. :emoji_rage:

(Oh. I'm going to try a couple of formats for listing all the makes and models on my website. It'll take a bit.)
 
I just love it. I need to come back when I have more time and peruse the splendid offerings.
 
You should have threatened it with Gallery4 Pete. That would really have made it quake in its boots.

I just love it. I need to come back when I have more time and peruse the splendid offerings.
Click to expand...

Yes they are. But mine aren't too shabby either... ;-)
 
It's still got a PHP back-end. It's all database-y.

There are degrees of user-friendly, but 4Images is so user-hostile, it once threatened me with Microsoft Bob. No one deserves that!
 
Helen has a lot of good stuff. I surprised myself because I didn't know about her 'site until she came here.

Not putting down my old website, saxpics.com, at all, but the idea behind my newer gallery is that I wanted bigger and better pics and prefer quality over quantity. Hey, when I started saxpics.com, 640x480 pics were BIG. The computer I'm using right now has a 1920x1280 display. That's 3ish times bigger.

Right before I sold saxpics.com, I had started using a gallery program called Coppermine. It was OK, but the support was a bit iffy and it wasn't that user-friendly on the admin end. Gallery 3's much nicer, but it's got some quirks and some support issues, too. I really like Piwigo and there are a couple things that might be able to export all my pics from Gallery 3 to Piwigo, but I get conflicting answers on whether or not I could transfer my album comments, which includes serial number info and all that. Something to play with more when I have the time.
 
Well we know that 4Images has no support, no transferablility, and is basically user hostile... Unless you can speak German, and then it is about 20% less user hostile, leaving me only 80% frustrated with my Gallery. But hey, I've got some really pretty pictures.

Oh, and speaking of pretty pics... I have to resize them, or they'll crash Lunar Pages, but I just got a whole bunch of lovely, big, pics of a Max Keilwerth President, and Hohner Presidents side by side. These horns are owned by a fellow in Europe who emailed me a couple of weeks ago. He and I have been exchanging emails since. Today he sent me the photos he took yesterday.

This is all very exciting, because I now have incontrovertible, photographic proof of the evolution of the President saxophone. Once these are published, they will be the only ones like it anywhere on the 'Net. (Trust me, I have looked for pics, there are none like this.)

Helen has a lot of good stuff. I surprised myself because I didn't know about her 'site until she came here.
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Part of it is that since I became ill--or neurologically challenged ;)--I have more time on my hands. My neurologist suggested I do something that resembles what I did in in my job, in an effort to see how my recovery was doing. Well my recovery is like hitting a brick wall most days. However, as a result, my website has gotten bigger and more focused on vintage saxophones. And according to the latest scans, at least my brain hasn't atrophied. ;)
 
My last brain scan:

[resize=400]http://images.fanpop.com/images/image_uploads/Homer-Brain-X-Ray-the-simpsons-60337_1024_768.jpg[/resize]
 
The other thing is, of course, Helen's my long-lost sister. We've discussed this in a few threads :).

Frivolity aside, if she and I compared neurological conditions, I'm like a Pepsi One and she's a double-strength Jolt cola. (Jolt's old slogan: "All the sugar and twice the caffeine.")

The interesting thing is that I actually haven't found a for-pay gallery software that's any better. If you go the route of some of the online big-name picture galleries, like Flickr, there's another problem: you're not necessarily allowed to repost pics from other websites. If you do, they can shut you down with no notice. I'd hate to put years of work into something and find that, not only is my website shut down, I can't even convert into a different format. Aside from that, they were fairly expensive if you went over a certain limit, both with how much stuff you post and bandwidth. It's counter-intuitive: you don't want your 'site to get too popular because it'll cost you a megabuck.
 
...as your brain scan shows up as a null image on my computer...
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I found Pete's scan. It wasn't easy, but luckily my hacking abilities are improving. ;-)

eeg-death.jpg


Unfortunately, my tests turned out worse.... I should not have signed that consent form. I guess that's what I get for shopping for a doctor on Craigslist! :D


 
I finally got all the makes on my gallery listed. One thing I forgot on my first attempt was to see how long each menu would be. If I didn't break up the menus the way I did, by groupings of 5 or 6 letters, the menu would extend off the screen.

I'll revisit these menus sometime and add a model breakdown, like I did for "Makes (A-E)," but it makes life easier for me, now, so I'm happy.
 
The menus are really helpful Pete. That's one of the things that I found really difficult with your gallery before. I couldn't really get a handle on the navigation. This makes it much easier to get around.

That's the one thing about 4Images that is actually very well laid out: the navigation. Additionally, it has breadcrumbs on the top work which aid in the navigation as well. The images for the categories, galleries, and albums are really useful to... as soon as you figure out how in the hell to do the hack. (That's were some of that 80/20 split of frustration/satisfaction I mentioned earlier comes in.)

I'm starting to think that there are no really perfect gallery programs available. Currently Lunar Pages offers me the following options: Coppermine, Tiny Web Gallery, Gallery (Version 3.0.4), Piwigo, Pixelpost, Zenphoto, phpAlbum, Shutter, 4Images, Plogger, & Gallery 2. I have tried setting up test sites of Coppermine... total frustration. Gallery... Not as bad a Coppermine, but not as intuitive as I thought it would be. I was going to give one or the other of the other ones a try, and see how I like them. However, even if I find one I like, I still haven't found any way to export my 4Images database, and recreating the wheel doesn't appeal to me a great deal. :cry:
 
Yah. It does seem, tho, that Piwigo will transfer anything from anything. However, that's just pictures and filenames. In my case, I've got info like serial number, date, and finish, along with make, model and pitch.

The big change from the flat file of stuff I had before to, well, any picture gallery software is the search function. Anything else is just extra goodies, so I could choose to have a fairly non-annoying interface on both the admin and user sides.

IMO, someone should set up a gallery and then customize it, but not so much that it can never be upgraded.
 
pete said:
Yah. It does seem, tho, that Piwigo will transfer anything from anything. However, that's just pictures and filenames. In my case, I've got info like serial number, date, and finish, along with make, model and pitch.
Click to expand...

Yup, me too. Plus I've got links to dealers in some cases. In the album descriptions, I also sometimes have links to resources, such as JK serial # chart, or to my info pages on specific brands (like Hohner, D&J, etc) from those galleries.

Pain in the ass...

For me the problem stems back to when I set up my gallery. At the time Lunar Pages only offered 4Images when I set up Bassic Sax Pix. I didn't have any other choices. Interestingly enough, 4Images was also rated the highest in gallery softest--based on the reading I did at the time. Here we are 2 years later, and they offer a plethora of choices. :emoji_rage:

I suspect 4Images isn't rated the highest anymore. Or maybe it is. They just brought out an update 2 months ago. I haven't checked it out, since it will require me to redo all my hacks from scratch again. This means I'm now 2 versions behind.

I guess it's time to call on my 4Images guru from Berlin. He'll upgrade me in no time. It takes him 5 minutes to do what it takes me 5 hours to do. (And I'll likely screw it up.)
 
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