Where is the full Gallery integration ?
Development and Programming
Greetings, I am fairly new to EE and have been very impressed with it as a CMS. Although i’m still getting a handle on what it can do and i don’t come to this with a programming background. My current questions/struggles involve integration with Gallery 2, which is one of the things that sold me on purchasing EE. Must say however that i am a little disappointed in what i am finding. Seems that the Gallery module in EE is quite paired down from a stand alone Gallery install. Please let me know if i am missing something somewhere. Here are my concerns:
- lack of access to EXIF/IPTC data embedded with jpeg images
- unsatisfied with the uploading process (including batch) in the Gallery module. It is not sustainable for large volumes of images (+20K/year)
- inability to use the Aperture to Gallery Export plugin by Ubermind <http://www.ubermind.com/beta/galleryexportforaperturebeta.php> (can’t get this Aperture plugin to work with the EE Gallery module on account of the way the EE Gallery is installed—keep getting connection errors.)
What I seem to have come to is running a full Gallery2 install parallel to EE and not using the Gallery module within EE. The full version of Gallery2 addresses all of the concerns above very well. For display purposes i am only using a small amount of the EXIF/IPTC data (primarily: caption, city, state, credit, copyright, date, object name, and keywords). The catch to this approach seems to be threading the Gallery2 data into the EE templating system (which does work very well within the gallery module). Perhaps this is no problem and a very possible thing for someone with more coding and PHP experience. I was looking for something that was relatively straightforward to figure out and still allowing for a high degree of customization. Still feel like i’m possibly just missing something. Or, that i’m asking for a level of integration that was alluded to in the promo material but is not delivered. Would be very happy if that hunch turned around.
Any recommendations for where to look for guides to integrating a stand alone Gallery2 into EE templates would be great. Better still would be some info on how to migrate data from the Gallery2 import directly into the EE Gallery module.
Again, i’m really keen on EE as a CMS and would like to use it for the site i am update as well as another more robust site—-if i can figure out how to put these pieces together.
Thanks in advance for the collective mind of the forum,
_chris
My current questions/struggles involve integration with Gallery 2, which is one of the things that sold me on purchasing EE.
Just for clarification: What makes you think that Gallery2 and ExpressionEngine are somehow related?
The description of the Gallery Module in the EE core led me to believe that there was full integration between Gallery and EE. Guess i’m learning otherwise… .?
The Photo Gallery module is a native EE module, without any relation to other software offering similar functionality.
The Photo Gallery module is a native EE module, without any relation to other software offering similar functionality.
Thanks Ingmar. That’s a clear statement and would have been helpful to see something to that affect in the Features listing about EE. Before purchasing i read through that closely and also spent a decent amount of time in the Knowledge Base and Forum looking for info about how the EE Gallery worked. Obviously i assumed it was integration with the standard Gallery application.
So this clarifies the options and brings up the trickier part of my question. Is it possible to include tags within EE templates that pull data out of the Gallery2 schema?
Thanks,
That’s a clear statement and would have been helpful to see something to that affect in the Features listing about EE.
To be honest, I think the reverse is equally true: Surly “Gallery” is generic enough a word that, just because EE does have a “Gallery” module, there’s no reason to assume it’s built on some other software?
So this clarifies the options and brings up the trickier part of my question. Is it possible to include tags within EE templates that pull data out of the Gallery2 schema?
I am not familiar with Gallery2. That said, you can use either native PHP or (if you use the same database for both EE and Gallery2) the query module to pull data out of the database. It’s a standard MySQL db after all.
I am not familiar with Gallery2. That said, you can use either native PHP or (if you use the same database for both EE and Gallery2) the query module to pull data out of the database. It’s a standard MySQL db after all.
Thanks. I’ll look into those options. Both sound like a bit more coding and programming than i had in mind, but perhaps that is inevitable given what i’m looking to do. You may want to take a look at the Gallery 2 Integration (which i just discovered) and consider if EE wants to more fully connect to Gallery2. Seems fairly widely used…