Photo Album Improvements

Ok, I have my site working fairly well, especially since I moved to a bigger server on Zarconia But I still have one section of my site that just sucks cold ass bananas.

Photos.....

My users are not complicated people. In fact, they love simple and efficient and don't need a lot of bells and whistles. All they need is a way to upload their photos and look at them, maybe pass them onto some other place.

A few wants and not wants....

• Want ... In order to save space, I want to limit photo upload size to a max width of 800px.
• Want ... I want to resample the image to that size and also compress it to save space
• Not Want ... I do NOT want to keep the original image
• Want ... I want the images to be easily available in my forum to add to a post. Although McImageManager is a good tool, it acts as a separator whereby users will have images located in more than one place on the server.. This will confuse them.

Maybe we are looking at this wrong. Maybe what we need is for someone to incorporate the McImageManager into the site to completely replace the photo mod that now exists. It creates separate user folders, can be taught to compress images as well as it can be made available everywhere, including my newly installed PK Forum...... The entire photo display options available in Dolphin are poorly conceived and applied and I want to DUMP the entire thing and do something that makes sense. I don't need flash (actually prefer NOT to use it) or ridiculous sliding cooliris screens or any of that other crap. I want functionality and I want it completely idiot proof......

The other problem I have is some of my images have disappeared. This is caused because I changed a few folder names, like one installation of EVO Wall, I named the virtual folder EVOwall, then next upgrade I changed it by leaving it default as "wall". Now the ones with the incorrect names can't be called up and I will most likely have to go in manually, scrape the photos out of the DB, rename them and reupload them. What a frikkin hassle.

I will accept any thoughts on this as well as anyone that can point out the flaws in my thinking. I know the reasons for changing the file names on the photos but to be honest, I would rather dump a watermark on the photo and let them surface everywhere...

 RE:

 That's something I suggested to Boonex two years ago: Client side image resizing.  Not only does it save space on the server, upload times can be over ten times faster.

Did Boonex do this?

NO

OK, these have already been address.  Dolphin already resizes images based on the settings you place in the photo module.  To change the compression for the images, you have to go into the photo module and change it there, I am not sure the exact place.  I agree that quality should be a setting in the admin as well instead of hard coded.

As for the original image, there are forum post on Boonex on how to remove the original image so it is not saved along with removing the button.

Note: should not be too hard to recode the module so that it uses a quality setting set in the photo module, Boonex should add this to the 7.1.5 release. (I think the value coded into the module is 90).

I already know how to adjust the compression. Resizing and resampling are two entirely different things. Now if these were the only issues, I'd be ok but they are not. I would like to have an admin setting where I can toss the original or not. Should not be that hard. Also, the images should be available site wide and they are NOT, especially in the groups, fish forum, or PK Forum. Unless you have MCImageManager installed, the user has to go to the photo mod, open the image, click "original" grab the url, then use that to post it in the forum. It is stupid, lame and cumbersome. 

I also still believe that images should be stored by user in a user assigned folder, not in some virtual name calling setup that dumps everything into one place and I'm not interested in having the security argument that goes along with that thinking as I am aware of it and not really interested.  Accessing the users images would be far easier for all the mod developers and more importantly, to the end user themselves in separate folders.

But hey, we can argue semantics or just get on with it. Anyone up to creating a McImageManager mod that will service the entire dolphin script?

Well, they are available state wide; you just use the URL.  People copy image urls from all over the net and uses them in posts, it really is not that difficult.

OK, note, you have to use the real URL to the image, not the URL in the browser address bar.  I thought Dolphin use to include the image url in the info box; but you can get the correct url by right-clicking on the image.

Yes, if ypou click 'original image' it gives you the image url. if you click the link, it goves you the url to the dolphin page that displays the image..... try it.

OK, I was not quite clear.  go to the photo view page, right click on the image to get the correct URL.  Maybe I will write a hack that will include the proper URL to use to insert the image somewhere else on the site.  I had a user that had the same problem, they grabbed the URL from the browser address bar.  Maybe it was Dolphin 7.0.9 that had the URL for the imagine in the info block.

 I thought so too.

When D7.0 arrived, swfupload was a cool thing.  That's not the case anymore.  Maybe in D 7.1.5,  Boonex will replace it with the uploader they built for Dolphin U.  I think I'll pester Boonex again to add the client side image resizing.

http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/ticket/3437