Ace

I'm currently working on a major re-write of MFG's image gallery software. The gallery is now so big that the current system is starting to show signs of stress.

Most of the changes will be on the back-end, and won't be visible to users. However, I'm also planning to add a few new features while I'm at it. Here are some ideas that I've been thinking about. I can't do them all, though, so I would be interested in hearing what you think -- or if you have other ideas that aren't on this list:

• Discuss -- per image and per folder
• Search (probably based on file or folder name only for now)
• Add image keywords / tags, and searching on them
• Breadcrumb (to make it easy to go back to an earlier folder)
• Create different sized wallpapers from a given image
• Member image upload into a "Member's Images" folder
• Show which folders have new images, with a "New" icon
• Sort by image size
• Sort by date added
• Reversable sort direction
• View all images (not just those in a particular folder), sorted in the same ways as folders (hits, name, rank, size, date added)
• Create an avatar-sized image
• Show number of users currently online
• Vote from the image detail page

Punxx

Those changes sound awesome Ace. I was going through the Image gallery the other day looking for Naruto stuff and just coulnd't find what I wanted. It looks like everything in there is sorted by Episode number and it just made a lot of things relatively unfindable. It's hard searching for anything when you're just trying to find scans of a certain character when not knowing the episode in which it was placed. So any additions to searching capability is much improved.

Also the member image upload for things like fan art is going to be a big plus. And the comments on individual images is also good. Nice to see so much progress.

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Ace

The search issue is challenging. The only things I can search on now are the names of the files and folders. The only way to know which characters are in an image is for someone to go through and tag each one. I'm thinking of adding some type of tagging to allow that, but since the gallery is so large, the hard part will be how to reliably accomplish the tagging process....

m.collins

those ideas are great Ace how long til it will be done?

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"Have you Enough yet, Buu?"

Ace

The first update of the Gallery is now live on MFG. Changes include:

-- A "Random" button that will display a new set of random images from the entire gallery every time you click on it
-- An "All" button that shows all of the images in the gallery, sorted by whichever key you've selected (name, rank, etc)
-- Ability to sort by date added
-- Many, many performance improvements; the core of the gallery was completely re-written
-- Several formatting bugs were fixed, such as reducing the size of the name of long folder names so that they don't get cut off
-- Various back-end admin stuff (not visible to regular users)
-- Display the number of users who are currently using the site; shown at the bottom of the gallery pages
-- Display up to 100 thumbnails per page

Sorry for the delay on this; I've had my hands full with family stuff for the last few months.

I'm going to try to make future updates more frequently...

links

I took a look at the gallery, and all the pictures are sorted by character/group, so searching based on character name doesn't really achieve much does it? The only time searching for character names would be useful is when looking for specific pictures in the group/multiperson images sections. Based on how your gallery is setup, if you still see the need for searching, can't you just enable the search for those sections only for now, it would reduce the need to go through and tag for every picture.

If you did want to do a search for all pictures, then a search for a specific character would yield the same result as redirecting them to the folder for that character.

Ace

Although there are sections for a few characters, most images aren't arranged that way. For example, there are many sections that are grouped on a per-episode basis.

Also, people often want to search on things other than just character names.... Which leads me back to image tags. Since we have more than 250,000 images in the gallery now, as I said before, the challenge is how to do large-scale tagging in a reliable way (I have some ideas). In the mean time, as you suggested, I might set up a search capability that would work based on file or folder names, since that's the only identifying info that we have at the moment.