PhotoZone or Do we need still another gallery extension?

By: Sebastian Kurfürst

When searching for photo gallerys in the Extension Repository, you'll get about 30 results. However, I still developed my own one for my own website, and think of releasing it publicly, that's why I need your opinion!

Did you ever try to create a beautiful, stunning and aesthetic photo website? During the last months, I tried: The current result can be found at photo-zone.eu .

When I started with photography, I soon thought about publishing the best pictures online - in an aesthetic way, pleasing for the eye.

I checked out some existing extensions, but for my taste, none of them focused on the image itself - instead, they had overview pages, comments ... a lot of features distracting from the image - and usually, the images were just really small.

That was my main motivation to create my own gallery: A gallery which looks great on a small 1024x768 screen, but as well on a huge 2048x1440 screen! I wanted to have as much room as possible for the image, that's why I implemented dynamic loading of the image depending on the available browser size. I as well liked the navigation of Adobe Lightroom, which displays a strip of preview images at the bottom of the window - so I tried to emulate this as well. (If you click on a Tag, you'll see a gallery covering the whole window which implements the features described above).

As I do not like repetitive tasks, I wanted to make adding images as easy as possible for me - just by moving them to a certain directory on the server (by ftp, rsync, ...) and they should appear automatically on the webpages.

As I am using F-Spot for photo management, I wanted to make the tag information available on the website as well - that means that while indexing, the tags are now extracted from the photos.

So this is my workflow now: After I took my photos and edited them in LightZone, I export them as JPG and import them in F-Spot, where I tag and categorize them correctly. Then, a cron job uploads them to the server, and the indexing cron job on the server adds them to PhotoZone :-) That's just the way I like it. Really easy and convenient.

I'd be very happy to hear your comments - do you want to have this extension published or is it just another gallery? Just comment on this blog post!

If you think it is worth publishing, do you want to become a beta tester to help me remove the last itches? Any help is greatly appreciated.

By the way - this extension is far from finished - I have lots of ideas to make finding images even easier and more aesthetically pleasing - stay tuned :-)

Greets from Dresden,

Sebastian