create gallery using existing photos from other galleries

cabinetbuff

Is it possible to create a gallery using existing photos from other galleries?

Ideally I'd like to be able to pick and choose existing photos from existing galleries and the result of this selection would be a brand new gallery with it's own set of permissions. I don't want to physically copy photos from existing galleries to this new one just "soft-link" them. Is this doable? If not, is it in the works yet?

I am curious how many of you have a need for this feature?

Thank you.

flyingwolf

This would be great for setting up a portfolio from previous galleries.

This would also reduce the amount of drive space used on SmugMugs drives as they would be softlinked images.

davidweaver

Poke around and look at posts about galleries from keywords. I havn'et done it but I think it is very doable.

Cheers,
David

pilotdave

Is it possible to create a gallery using existing photos from other galleries?

What you're describing is commonly referred to as a Virtual Gallery. A lot of other services offer them and it's been requested eleventy billion times.

Keyword galleries are not a viable solution, in my opinion, because they don't allow any gallery customization. You can't even arrange the photos in any sensible order. Works for some uses, but it's not the same as a virtual gallery.

Dave

cabinetbuff

pilotdave wrote:

What you're describing is commonly referred to as a Virtual Gallery. A lot of other services offer them and it's been requested eleventy billion times.

I am a database admin / architect and I design apps for the web for a living -- based on my experience, if the underlying data model is correct, this feature should be fairly straight forward to implement. In fact, it could probably be done using SmugMug API.

Is it just a timing issue or is there something fundamentally more complicated involved here that I am not aware of?

jfriend

cabinetbuff wrote:

I am a database admin / architect and I design apps for the web for a living -- based on my experience, if the underlying data model is correct, this feature should be fairly straight forward to implement. In fact, it could probably be done using SmugMug API.

Is it just a timing issue or is there something fundamentally more complicated involved here that I am not aware of?

There was a thread a little while ago that indicated that virtual galleries was being worked on, but we have no idea when it will get introduced.

I can imagine that the core view is not that difficult (heck they already do some of it via keywords), but there's probably a fair amount of UI around building the view and then lots of UI edge cases to handle things like when you delete an image, are you simply removing it from the virtual gallery or deleting it everywhere, how to you pick images for the virtual gallery, are there keyword queries that can be used, etc... When you replace a photo, which are you doing? Are there separate crops, prices, etc... Deletes probably now need ref counts so they can know when there are no longer any references to an image. Is it only an owner specified thing? Or can viewers create their own collections like they can on Zenfolio? All solvable problems, but I can imagine that a thorough implementation runs into a lot of these kinds of issues and takes some time.

cabinetbuff

jfriend wrote:

There was a thread a little while ago that indicated that virtual galleries was being worked on, but we have no idea when it will get introduced.

I can imagine that the core view is not that difficult (heck they already do some of it via keywords), but there's probably a fair amount of UI around building the view and then lots of UI edge cases to handle things like when you delete an image, are you simply removing it from the virtual gallery or deleting it everywhere, how to you pick images for the virtual gallery, are there keyword queries that can be used, etc... When you replace a photo, which are you doing? Are there separate crops, prices, etc... Deletes probably now need ref counts so they can know when there are no longer any references to an image. Is it only an owner specified thing? Or can viewers create their own collections like they can on Zenfolio? All solvable problems, but I can imagine that a thorough implementation runs into a lot of these kinds of issues and takes some time.

These are all good, thought out points ... And I am sure there are SmugMug customers out there that would appreciate many of the features you outlined above, but for my own purposes, I am looking for a very basic pick-and-choose UI that will allow me to select images from multiple, existing galleries, organize them in the order I need, add captions and save (the meta-data not the physical images) in a Virtual Gallery so that I can give it to my friends, family and customers to view.

In regards to deletes -- if an original image is deleted it should be removed from all Virtual Galleries that reference it -- give a warning, accept Y|N and off it. And if an image is deleted from a Virtual Gallery it should not be deleted from the original. Think soft link concept.

I would even go as far as to say that for my purposes, at least in v1, I don't even care if I can print from these Virtual Galleries -- it's more for sharing and community building than anything else. Though, I do want to be able to take comments and optionally password protect the Gallery.

darryl

cabinetbuff wrote:

These are all good, thought out points ... And I am sure there are SmugMug customers out there that would appreciate many of the features you outlined above, but for my own purposes, I am looking for a very basic pick-and-choose UI that will allow me to select images from multiple, existing galleries, organize them in the order I need, add captions and save (the meta-data not the physical images) in a Virtual Gallery so that I can give it to my friends, family and customers to view.

How would a pick-and-choose UI be simple if you had 50 galleries? 100 galleries? 300?

I would think it would be easier to implement this from the non-virtual gallery side, where you'd have a function like, "Copy this image/these images to a virtual gallery", and you're only picking from one gallery at a time.

Organization should be simple enough, once the photos are in a virtual gallery.

But oof, captions. Seems like that'd be tricky, because they'd have to potentially store multiple captions per photo, depending on the context (which gallery) of the image being viewed. Certainly do-able, but not trivial.

Anyways, here's one of the lengthier threads on the topic, including recent posts from Balmer, whose "first big job is to see what can be done about making the category/subcategory stuff Amazing. It started out looking like a small addition, but it's turning into a pretty big and exciting deal the more I dig in and grok how other users organize their pics."

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=90764&page=17

cabinetbuff

darryl wrote:

How would a pick-and-choose UI be simple if you had 50 galleries? 100 galleries? 300?

In UI I'd put a nav-bar with a list of galleries, when you click on the gallery link in the nav-bar the content window gets populated with the gallery photos, you click the photos you want to select and AJAX will remember you selection (possibly stuff selection thumbs into another DIV/PANE), you then move onto the next gallery from the nav-bar and select photos from there -- they get added to the selected list; once you are satisfied with the selection you click "Create Virtual Gallery" button and it asks you for the title/description; it then takes you to the newly created Virtual Gallery ... Very simple -- that's what I would want anyway.

darryl wrote:

I would think it would be easier to implement this from the non-virtual gallery side, where you'd have a function like, "Copy this image/these images to a virtual gallery", and you're only picking from one gallery at a time.

I think the process I outlined above works much faster.

darryl wrote:

But oof, captions. Seems like that'd be tricky, because they'd have to potentially store multiple captions per photo, depending on the context (which gallery) of the image being viewed. Certainly do-able, but not trivial.

That's why all dev projects need a strong DBA -- this IS a trivial thing, that's what one-to-many ER is for. Each image can belong to many Virtual Galleries, under each gallery it can have a unique caption, if the caption in Virtual Gallery is NOT set the caption from the contaning gallery should be displayed (use NVL function)

darryl wrote:

Anyways, here's one of the lengthier threads on the topic, including recent posts from Balmer, whose "first big job is to see what can be done about making the category/subcategory stuff Amazing. It started out looking like a small addition, but it's turning into a pretty big and exciting deal the more I dig in and grok how other users organize their pics."

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=90764&page=17

Thanks for the link -- if SmugMug gets this implemented and it's done right that would be great, othewise I am seriously considering doing it outside using SmugMug API.

darryl

Uber-Thread for "Copy To Gallery" / "Virtual Gallery" Feature Request:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=110537

PBolchover

In the meantime, it's reasonably easy to create your own virtual galleries, based on keywords. For example,
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/keyword/dordogne07best

You can even make the virtual galleries appear alongside the normal galleries in categories, have descriptions, and have a normal breadcrumbtrail.

In short, nearly everything you want can be done with a bit of creative hackery.

jfriend

PBolchover wrote:

In the meantime, it's reasonably easy to create your own virtual galleries, based on keywords. For example,
http://pbolchover.smugmug.com/keyword/dordogne07best

You can even make the virtual galleries appear alongside the normal galleries in categories, have descriptions, and have a normal breadcrumbtrail.

In short, nearly everything you want can be done with a bit of creative hackery.

It works under some circumstances, but I wouldn't call it "nearly everything" - it's still limited in many ways that hopefully real virtual galleries won't be.

For example, you can't use keywords in password protected galleries or unlisted galleries. You have to enable Smugmug searching or keywords won't work. You can't specify a sort order (it always puts most recent images first). Getting breadcrumbs to look decent and not all techy like the keyword paenl normal looks takes some significant Javascript work.

cabinetbuff

cabinetbuff wrote:

... I am seriously considering doing it outside using SmugMug API.

Well, two months down the road and here I am, with trembling fingers typing this, replying to my own post and I really can't even believe it myself -- the Virtual Galleries are now possible on http://www.ttljournal.com/.

I don't know how many of SmugMug users have been craving this functionality, but I know that I really needed it so I decided it would be a good idea to make it available for everyone via ttljournal. Thanks to the great SmugMug API, Jquery, PHP and phpSmug the development time to deliver the beta was fairly short -- just over two months.

I would also like to thank my business partner at HASHJOIN for letting me use our internet infrastructure for this project -- thank you Paris .

Please let me know what you think -- it's still in BETA, but I've tested both FF and IE (grrrr) so you should be good to go on those two browsers:

http://www.ttljournal.com/

Here's the list of currently available functionality on ttljournal (beta):

• create ttljournal account
• add single or multiple SmugMug users to your account using either Public or Private option (private option is implemented using OAuth protocol so that your SmugMug password is never stored in ttljournal database)
• create Virtual Gallery using images from various SmugMug galleries and even galleries that belong to multiple users
• make Virtual Gallery private
• edit image captions in Virtual Galleries
• edit Permalink for the Virtual Gallery

Thanks!

caroline

Excuse my techie limitations please - I have created a couple of test galleries but where will these show on my smugmug site ? At the moment i can't see them.

Caroline

cabinetbuff

Caroline,

Thanks for trying out ttljournal!

The Virtual Galleries that you create on ttljournal stay there, so instead of giving your friends and family a link that points to your SmugMug gallery you'd give them a link that points to the ttljournal.

The images are still stored on SmugMug but the gallery definition (meta-data) is stored on ttljournal so you have to go to ttljournal to view the Virtual Gallery.

Hope this helps and if you have any other questions please let me know.

- Vitaliy

darryl

Wow, neat stuff. Really like it for the most part although there's obviously some stuff missing in this beta:

- Ability to add more photos to an existing gallery
- Sorting
- Video
- Different layout options

Still, amazingly slick for 2 months worth of work. Wow! And if anything, a great example of how folks can take advantage of the OAuth stuff in the API.

Here's my quick test gallery I threw together:

http://www.ttljournal.com/g/2021-concert-photos.html

Your examples are interesting -- virtual galleries of other people's work. I wonder how that will sit with professional photogs if proper attribution is not given.

darryl

Bug report:

Trying to add a second private account via OAuth. I logged out of my other account, then went through the process. Got this error:

Ack! SmugMug doesn't recognize this application's credentials.

We're really sorry, but for some reason we're unable to authorize an application that wants to access your account.

We enable you to securely authorize many great applications so you can do exciting things with your photos, but this particular application did not provide all the information we need.

We hate having to say this because it sounds like we're passing the buck, but you'll have to contact whoever developed it.

After various combinations of logging back out and then back in again (sorry, I'm a horrible tester), I got it to work. But something's wonky.

caroline

Thanks, I get it now :-)
Caroline

cabinetbuff wrote:

Caroline,

Thanks for trying out ttljournal!

The Virtual Galleries that you create on ttljournal stay there, so instead of giving your friends and family a link that points to your SmugMug gallery you'd give them a link that points to the ttljournal.

The images are still stored on SmugMug but the gallery definition (meta-data) is stored on ttljournal so you have to go to ttljournal to view the Virtual Gallery.

Hope this helps and if you have any other questions please let me know.

- Vitaliy

cabinetbuff

darryl wrote:

Wow, neat stuff. Really like it for the most part although there's obviously some stuff missing in this beta:

- Ability to add more photos to an existing gallery
- Sorting
- Video
- Different layout options

Still, amazingly slick for 2 months worth of work. Wow! And if anything, a great example of how folks can take advantage of the OAuth stuff in the API.

Here's my quick test gallery I threw together:

http://www.ttljournal.com/g/2021-concert-photos.html

darryl,

Thanks for the feedback -- I really appreciate it! The following features that you referenced are on the very next to-do list:

- Ability to add more photos to an existing gallery
- Sorting

In regards to the "Different layout options" -- I don't know if you noticed but ttljournal's current layout is similar to youtube and for a very good reason -- I'd like to encourage heavy comments on the gallery pages and the idea is to provide a familiar interface where comments have been very successful -- youtube. In fact the comments functionality is the very next on the to-do list. But, I am open to suggestions here so fire away

"Video", yes that would be very cool -- I have to review the API to see how to go about it ...

darryl wrote:

Your examples are interesting -- virtual galleries of other people's work. I wonder how that will sit with professional photogs if proper attribution is not given.

All the images in the example gallery are from SmugMug's public galleries on which external links were allowed. But if we are doing something wrong please let me know and I'll take those examples down replacing it with the images from my own SmugMug galleries.

cabinetbuff

darryl wrote:

Bug report:

Trying to add a second private account via OAuth. I logged out of my other account, then went through the process. Got this error:



After various combinations of logging back out and then back in again (sorry, I'm a horrible tester), I got it to work. But something's wonky.

darryl,

Thanks -- I'll look into this, I have to get another SmugMug account to test with, so bear with me on this.

- Vitaliy

FrankC

Hi Vitaliy - another little bug :

I was trying to sign up to try it out. However, the email address seems to be limited to 30 chars.
It turns out that my address was longer than this - so it got truncated (saw this in the screen where it says a confirmation message will be sent) - hence no confirmation message.
I can't re-login to change the email address, so will try again with a different (shorter) address.

Anyway - looks like a very interesting Smugmug add-on.

Thanks - Frank.

cabinetbuff

FrankC wrote:

Hi Vitaliy - another little bug :

I was trying to sign up to try it out. However, the email address seems to be limited to 30 chars.
It turns out that my address was longer than this - so it got truncated (saw this in the screen where it says a confirmation message will be sent) - hence no confirmation message.
I can't re-login to change the email address, so will try again with a different (shorter) address.

Anyway - looks like a very interesting Smugmug add-on.

Thanks - Frank.

Frank,

Thanks for pointing this out -- it should be fixed now. Please try again with the long email -- -- sorry about that!

- Vitaliy

Hyperiate

cabinetbuff wrote:

All the images in the example gallery are from SmugMug's public galleries on which external links were allowed. But if we are doing something wrong please let me know and I'll take those examples down replacing it with the images from my own SmugMug galleries.

Hi Vitaliy,

This is a very cool application! One feature request which might mitigate the above concern would be to include a link to get to the original gallery/image on the smugmug site. I wanted to see more images from the series that Andy's IR bee shot is from, but there is no way to get to that gallery from the ttljournal site (meaning I can't buy the image either!).

From a UI perspective I would have expected that clicking on the large image itself would take me to the smugmug page, but another link entirely would probably be a good addition -- people like photo credits to be maintained wherever possible.

Cheers,
Tom B

cabinetbuff

Hyperiate wrote:

Hi Vitaliy,

This is a very cool application! One feature request which might mitigate the above concern would be to include a link to get to the original gallery/image on the smugmug site. I wanted to see more images from the series that Andy's IR bee shot is from, but there is no way to get to that gallery from the ttljournal site (meaning I can't buy the image either!).

From a UI perspective I would have expected that clicking on the large image itself would take me to the smugmug page, but another link entirely would probably be a good addition -- people like photo credits to be maintained wherever possible.

Cheers,
Tom B

Tom,

Thanks for checking out ttljournal and for your valuable suggestion -- that is doable and I'll make this as an optional feature which could be set at the Virtual Gallery level or even per image level because there are times when you want to "hide" the original gallery location -- after all, Virtual Gallery is meant to show only a subset of images for various reasons.

Most of times the Virtual Galleries will be created and maintained by the image owners themselves so there should be no issues with picture credit. Nevertheless I like your idea and will work on getting it implemented.

- Vitaliy

cabinetbuff

Hyperiate wrote:

This is a very cool application! One feature request: ... include a link to get to the original gallery/image on the smugmug site.

Tom,

Again, thanks for the great suggestion and I just wanted to say that it's been implemented. I've added a "Link To SmugMug" feature at the "Edit Gallery" level which can be overwritten at an individual Image level using "Edit Image Metadata".

When you set Link To SmugMug to "Yes" ttljournal will generate a link back to the original SmugMug gallery and place that link right underneath the current image being displayed in the ttljournal virtual gallery.

I've enabled this feature on all Sample galleries on ttljournal -- here's an example:

Selected Winners from Dgrin Challenges

- Vitaliy

cabinetbuff

darryl wrote:

Wow, neat stuff. Really like it for the most part although there's obviously some stuff missing in this beta:

- Ability to add more photos to an existing gallery
- Sorting
...

UPDATE: I've added "Arrange Images" functionality (Sorting). It also allows you to "Delete" an image by double-clicking on it.

Here's a "dummy" demo for those that don't yet have ttljournal account but want to check it out:

http://www.ttljournal.com/del_arr_demo.html

For those that do have ttljournal account, you can get to it by navigating to "My galleries -> Edit Gallery -> Arrange Images".

PS: I am brainstorming adding functionality which will allow you to embed a Virtual Gallery created on ttljournal on any web-page using JS. The JS will be dynamically generated and pulled from our server and it will contain a list of images from the Virtual Gallery ... Any pointers or good examples of this you might have please let me know. Thanks!

- Vitaliy

papajay

Thrust upon the horns of a dilemma!
As one who joined the "Wouldn't Virtual Galleries Be Neat...And When Can We Get Them?" crowd quite some time ago, I suddenly find myself "conflicted" now that it appears VG-functionality is at last possible with SmugMug. I want it, but am hesitant to try it.

I'm not a techie, so I find API's, Java, and other such jargon difficult to wrap my brain around. Before I dive-in, I'd like to know what I'm diving into.

Vitaliy...please don't take this the wrong way. I applaude the fact that you appear to have accomplished something on your own in two months time that has been a requested functionality and a topic of discussion on Dgrin for two years.

And as good as it may very well be, or become, what troubles me a bit about this is that it isn't a Smuggy designed/developed/supported application (correct, Andy?) and almost "encourages" Smuggy to abandon current efforts (if there are any) or postpone future efforts to build-in this capability as a standard feature.

What happens if Vitaliy gets hit by a bus? Does the application live on?

cabinetbuff

papajay wrote:

As one who joined the "Wouldn't Virtual Galleries Be Neat...And When Can We Get Them?" crowd quite some time ago, I suddenly find myself "conflicted" now that it appears VG-functionality is at last possible with SmugMug. I want it, but am hesitant to try it.

I'm not a techie, so I find API's, Java, and other such jargon difficult to wrap my brain around. Before I dive-in, I'd like to know what I'm diving into.

Vitaliy...please don't take this the wrong way. I applaude the fact that you appear to have accomplished something on your own in two months time that has been a requested functionality and a topic of discussion on Dgrin for two years.

And as good as it may very well be, or become, what troubles me a bit about this is that it isn't a Smuggy designed/developed/supported application (correct, Andy?) and almost "encourages" Smuggy to abandon current efforts (if there are any) or postpone future efforts to build-in this capability as a standard feature.

What happens if Vitaliy gets hit by a bus? Does the application live on?

thanks papajay! You've made my day! You are correct -- at this time ttljournal is not in any way shape or form affiliated with SmugMug. It is sponsored by HASHJOIN which I am a part owner. What we've done with ttljournal is not meant to replace SmugMug functionality only to augment it. And if one day SmugMug will have their own Virtual Gallery functionality I would only applaud it -- after all I am their (happy) customer!

We are a small company with very serious and concrete goals to make ttljournal valuable to SmugMug users beyond the Virtual Gallery feature. And in regards to the tech-jargon and APIs -- the goal with ttljournal is to handle all that for you so you can focus on photography. You will not need to do anymore tech with ttljournal than you are already accustomed to with SmugMug.

HTH,
- Vitaliy

cabinetbuff

papajay wrote:

What happens if Vitaliy gets hit by a bus? Does the application live on?

papajay, please knock on wood for me

All I can say is that, yes, I am the only one doing the driving right now, so all you can do is hop on and enjoy the ride if you like where we are going . And if we are all enjoying the ride chances are someone will give me a hand in the driver seat.

One thing is for sure -- ttljournal is here and you can create Virtual Galleries today so it's up to you to decide the reward vs the risk factor. All I can tell you is that regardless of what happens with ttljournal, your images are safely tucked away on SmugMug -- ttljournal doesn't "move" them, it just gives them a different view which you fully control.

And who knows? ... Maybe one day, when enough of us SmugMug users are on ttljournal, it will automagically and transparently become SmugMug so I say, "hop on and enjoy the ride!" and lets see where it takes us?

- Vitaliy

papajay

cabinetbuff wrote:

papajay, please knock on wood for me

All I can say is that, yes, I am the only one doing the driving right now, so all you can do is hop on and enjoy the ride if you like where we are going . And if we are all enjoying the ride chances are someone will give me a hand in the driver seat.

One thing is for sure -- ttljournal is here and you can create Virtual Galleries today so it's up to you to decide the reward vs the risk factor. All I can tell you is that regardless of what happens with ttljournal, your images are safely tucked away on SmugMug -- ttljournal doesn't "move" them, it just gives them a different view which you fully control.

And who knows? ... Maybe one day, when enough of us SmugMug users are on ttljournal, it will automagically and transparently become SmugMug so I say, "hop on and enjoy the ride!" and lets see where it takes us?

- Vitaliy

Vitaliy. This is all sounding better...let's hope the bus thing is just rhetorical.

Now a question for Andy...I "get it" (I think) that what Vitaliy has done is an application. But it's an application that somehow flies inside SmugMug's airspace, with me as the pilot or co-pilot, right?

How do I know it can be trusted not to corrupt something SmugMug or I have done? (Don't take the question personally, Vitaliy...it's more "rhetorical"/hypothetical than accusatory).

Andy, is it the API animal (which SmugMug does control, right?) that provides the boundaries and "no-fly-zones" within SmugMug that govern, dictate or control how applications like Vitaliy's navigate safely on our behalf? Just curious.

jfriend

papajay wrote:

Vitaliy. This is all sounding better...let's hope the bus thing is just rhetorical.

Now a question for Andy...I "get it" (I think) that what Vitaliy has done is an application. But it's an application that somehow flies inside SmugMug's airspace, with me as the pilot or co-pilot, right?

How do I know it can be trusted not to corrupt something SmugMug or I have done? (Don't take the question personally, Vitaliy...it's more "rhetorical"/hypothetical than accusatory).

Andy, is it the API animal (which SmugMug does control, right?) that provides the boundaries and "no-fly-zones" within SmugMug that govern, dictate or control how applications like Vitaliy's navigate safely on our behalf? Just curious.

Unless you give Vitaliy's application your username and password, the API only has read-only access to your account. It can only list what galleries and images are set for public access, get the URLs and some properties (that you have allowed to be public) and construct pages with those URLs. It cannot change your account without logging in. It also cannot see unlisted galleries or inside of password protected galleries without you logging in through the application.

So, if you don't give his application your username and password so it can log in as you the owner, then no API function is supposed to be able to change your account.