We're having a busy week here at silverorange. Today we pushed live a beta version of our new photo gallery software, Pinhole (latest build will be released shortly). As an early adopter/guinea pig I've switched my personal gallery over. We've gone from a completely closed source category based system to a completely open source tag based system. Feel free to try it out for yourself. Naturally it's built on top of swat.
It's going to be a little rough around the edges for the next little while as we polish it. Photo comments will come along soon as will some other nice features. You'll notice that the "tags" in my gallery really aren't great. This is a side-effect of switching from a category based system to a tag based system. I'll be working back through the thousands of photos in the next few months to clean this up.
Let us know what you think and please feel free to try it out or get involved with the development!
Other public galleries running Pinhole:
- Pictures of Steven (actsofvolition.com)
- Mike's Gallery (fellow slice at silverorange)
Comments
Keir Whitaker - August 3, 2007 4:43 AM
Pinhole looks very nice. Any chance of a screenshot or two of the admin side of things?
The main reason I ask is that I am currently in the process of moving my hand rolled journal system from a category based system to tags. The current method allows you to check any number of categories so that any post can sit in any number of categories, however the ease of use of tags has won me over.
The main problem I am struggling with is the interface for the actual tagging of a post. I would be really interested to know how you approached this for tagging a photo, did you go for a similar approach to say del.icio.us or did you dream up something entirely of your own thinking?
Any thoughts or ideas would be great.
Dan James - August 3, 2007 11:01 AM
Hey Keir,Thanks for the post. I'll do my best to answer. Disclaimer: We're VERY early on in this development process and tagging photos in the admin is one of our weak areas. We have plans to improve it drastically.
Currently to tag a photo you can go to the photo edit page in the admin. There is a simple ajax enabled text box that automatically displays tags ALA google suggest as you type. When you select the tag it is automatically thrown below the text box with a remove link:
<p>
<img class="border" src="http://www.ceoblues.com/local/ceoblues/images/galleryajax.jpg">
</p>
<p>
<img class="border" src="http://www.ceoblues.com/local/ceoblues/images/gallerynoajax.jpg">
</p>
<p>Of course the time taken, and some other fields, are automagically filled in with the exif data if available. We're going to be improving this over the next while as it does have known limitations. One thing not shown above is the ability to select a group of photos and tag them together, streamlining the process of tagging larger batches of photos.</p>
<p>I hope this helps!</p>
Keir Whitaker - August 4, 2007 1:27 PM
Dan, many thanks for the insight and the screen grabs - it certainly helped.
I really like your approach. The ajax text box is a neat idea and something I hadn't considered but great if you have a lot of tags in the system. One of my main issues was displaying a huge list of tags on the post entry page, the ajax idea would certainly solve this.
It would be really interesting to hear about the new features when you add them and to learn of any challenges faced on the way.