Hi! I have been looking all over the place to find a good Image gallery extension in Joomla that allows to me displays many different albums in a nice and friendly way.
Nothing fancy really, I just need the Gallery or album list view with a thumbnail to represent that album/category together with a short description of the image category and maybe the number of pictures in each category, a Category or Album view where there would be thumbnails of all the pictures in a given category/album and finally a detailed view, which hopefully should be customizable so as to offer different options.
The type of display I'm most interested in for the detailed view is a popup window displayed inside the current window, showing my image clear and large, fitted to my browser window dimensions so as to take advantage of all the screen real estate and with a few buttons to move forward and backward between the images and hopefully the possibility to have a slideshow feature within the popup.
Another feature which is somewhat optional but very well appreciated too is the ability to post comments about the categories and/or the images, directly from within the popup view or within the category/album view, using Jcomments or Facebook comments for instance.
Well… I must say that Phoca Gallery does pretty much all of that and in a pretty nice way… but not nice enough for me!
The part I don't like much is the popup view. The main problem comes from the size of images: it is fixed for most views, which means it could appear nice or not depending on what the final user screen resolution and browser window space he is using and that means that I need to struggle and test lots of different options to find something I more or less like. That's not very good to me! I would rather want to know how it will look beforehand than putting a fixed size which would look different from one screen to the next and never be sure of how the final users see the images.
The display style that most fits my needs in Phoca Gallery currently is the Slimbox but the problem with slimbox is that there is no slideshow support, nor embedded comments in Slimbox popup view and that image size is fixed! So it appears too big at some screen resolutions, too small at others and just as I like only for some specific screen resolution and window space..
In the end the look and feel I would like to see is the one used by the Sigplus extension, which in terms of popup displays exactly the images as I like to see them, meaning fitted to the window, with all controls nice and clear and always accessible, independent of what resolution my images were in. The problem with that extension is that there is no comment support and above all no category management, which is something I need.
I've had several times what appears to be a bug when I upload photos to a new category. Everything seems to go smooth but when it's done and I go check the album all images and thumbnails appear blank! Then If in the administration of Phoca Gallery I try to display the images it goes into recreating thumbnails automatically, which in turns fixes the problem. Not really sure what happens but as long as it works rather quickly afterward it's not a huge deal but still ackward..
I also encountered some failures while uploading some photos with the Java upload tool. Sometimes it would upload, say, 10 pictures out of 30 and give out an error message.
I then need to refresh to see that there were some photos uploaded. I have no clues what happened!!
The flash upload doesn't work for me with Flash version 10. I read somewhere that only Flash version 9 is supported… that's really a pity but as long as the java upload works more or less I'm still happy.
Finally in the multiple add view I would like to see an indication of what folder we're in because if we missclick the folder name where we want to upload the photos then we would not know it.
I've read somewhere that if I don't create a folder, putting the images in a new category would create the folder for me or something like that… Well that would actually be nice but I didn't really see that happen.
It would be good if Phoca Gallery could automatically create one folder for each category I create and let me assign the images to the category without the need for me to go and create a specific folder each time and choose it to upload my photos. I think this is very easy to develop and would greatly simplify the process of uploading photos!!
About the thumbnails to display the image representing a gallery, I sometimes had an image which had non standard 4:3 or 3:4 dimensions and the thumbnail image would come out the little square that is supposed to surround that thumbnail image. That happens when I use images that are wery wide and not tall for instance. Looks weird.
Also a simple request, I would like to be able to show the category description text in the Gallery/album list view instead of the category/album view. The option to do either one would be great but for me I most need to know the description before I enter a specific gallery!
Hence, although Phoca Gallery is pretty close from making me really happy, I feel that it is not there yet (for me).
Anyway for the price let's be clear it is a great extension and hopefully one day it'll be able to do all the nice things I'm dreaming of! ;-)
Don't hesitate to write back, should you want more details on something I said, I'd be more than happy to assist.
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