there is a fine line between agile and fragile
The Gallery team has released the first "Technology Preview" of Gallery 3. As this is a preview, it has not yet been through the normal security audits and it's not quite ready for prime time quite yet.
It does, however, have a lot features already implemented and more is in the pipeline before the estimated tentatively release of the first version in about 6 weeks.
Check it out, it does indeed show some great promise!
It's about time I rolled up my sleeves and got working on this as well.
Let me just start off by saying that I am in no way a javascript wizard. I'm even hesitant to call myself a developer of any kind as most of the "development" work I've done has been of the hack'n'slash type. For the most part I can get something started, or hack something existing to work the way I want it to.
This post isn't about my ineptitude as a developer though, but rather about the discoveries I made while investigating jQuery based plugins to do some photography presentations on the photo365.org site I recently hacked together.
All Lightbox inspired solutions were automatically disqualified, at least in the long run, as thats been overdone basically everywhere by now. I do use a Thickbox on the site right now though, but thats not the solution I really want to stick with in the end. Consider it a placeholder for now.
After looking for pre-made plugins that could help the site display the photos, I was left with a list of potential candidates:
All of these, besides Galleriffic have one major flaw, at least how I see it. They all download the full size image you wanto to display and then resize them in browser. Not only is this slow, but it's a huge bandwidth eater. Trent Foley’s Galleriffic however, does this a bit differently. Like all the others, it's based on an unordered list that holds your images, but instead of just doing a simple html img off the fulle size image, it implements a way to show a specific thumbnail that links to the full image you want to display. You can even link to the original image for download purposes if you want.
In my particular case, where I on each of the participating photographers "profile page" will end up with showing a total of 365 images on a single page, the bandwidth waste is very obvious.
To break it down, we end up with some number similar to this (Based on 1 random image from the pool):
Now, if you add all of this up you will end up with a calculation that is something like this:
This equals an approximate difference of 17 Megabytes transferred on each page request that this particular profile page gets. I could of course split my profile pages into smaller chunks and help relieve some of the bandwidth usage per page load that way, but my I want to display all of the thumbnails all at once.
As I said, I'm no javascript wizard and I'm sure there are good reasons why most of these plugins behave the way they do. Grabbing the full image and then resize it "locally" seems to be the easy way to implement something like this and I guess easy is what we are all looking for. Doing this does make the html markup very easy, and if you don't have thumbnails readily available in your setup it's fine. In my case, I do have thumbnails and I want to utilize them properly.
Did I miss some great jQuery based photo showoff plugin that I should have looked at? I'm sure there are several that consider the needs of bandwidth concious users out there, and that I've just missed them. If that is the case, please let me know.
Now I'm off to try and actually get Galleriffic integrated into my photo365 project site.
Another year is nearly over and done with, and 2009 is only a few hours away here in Norway. Instead of doing a wrap up of 2008, I’ll take a look at the upcoming new year and explain why it has potential to be a great year.
There are three things on my list that should make 2009 most excellent.
So there it is. My own personal list of exciting things to look forward to in 2009. Of course, there are many other things that should make 2009 great, but these are the ones in the forefront of my mind right now.
On a personal level, I hope that a few of the changes planned around here and on opticalpork.com will make a difference. I have a lot planned, time will show if I'm actually able to pull it off. I can promise one thing though. My posts here will be more focused and regular than before.
Welcome 2009. You look promising, now don't disappoint me.
With the development of Gallery 3 well underway and in constant evolvement I'm thinking quite a lot about Photo Gallery theme development. I have some ideas about what I would like to do in a Gallery 3 theme, but nothing is decided as I have yet to sit down and actually try to design a mockup or anything.
So far it seems like the javascript library of choice in Gallery 3 will be jQuery which should make things a fair bit easier for me to work with. Also, the abundance of plugins available for jQuery is certain to help me out with adding some nice little effects to the final theme.
I'm looking forward to theming Gallery 3 as the theme system matures, so far it's looking very good and the current incarnation should make it fairly easy to get started with Gallery 3 theming. Hopefully this means that we will see a lot of great themes produced in the time ahead!
For now though, I would like to ask for inspiration. Do you know of a great photo gallery theme that you would like to show me? It doesn't have to be css/html only, flash based sites work for inspiration as well even if my theme most certainly won't be flash based at all.
So, what do you say? Want to help me find inspiration for a great Gallery 3 theme?
So, in a true Halloween spirit a new monster has been released to the general public. Ok, it might not be a monster just yet, but the aim is to get a "production use" Gallery 3 product ready for general release on February 1st 2009.
Check out the current code via SVN: svn co http://gallery.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gallery/gallery3/trunk gallery3
More details are available on the Gallery-Devel mailinglist.
The countdown has begun, T-92 days to go.