Thumbnail galleries

I originally posted this for UBB, but something tells me it's about time I change software I'm sick of dealing with complicated hacks, and I was simply wondering if the following feature would be hard to create for vBulletin :

Basically what this hack would do is to create thumbnail gallery where people could post their wallpapers and other graphics, have them sorted in different categories etc. and all of this based on the VBB community software.

I created some screenshots to illustrate what I'm trying to explain.

Posting a 'New image' (instead of 'New Thread')



This is what the post would look like :



And finally, the alternate forum display page with screenshots :



Now I don't know PHP that good at all, so I think it's rather pointless that I try to go further than this.

I was just hoping that someone would catch this idea and develop it. Knowing the capabilities of PHP, this type of feature shouldn't be too hard to create. The real problem would be to get it to blend with the forums correctly.

I know for a fact that this feature would be perfect for many sites out there and I'm sure all of you digital art lovers would like it too!

Ovegrow's hack is the closest thing I've come to finding something similar.

Tell me what you think.
Pe<|ce

PS. I originally posted this in the 2.0 suggestion forums, but I realized that this might be a better place to discuss it. Sorry about that

[Overgrow]

Bingo.. you see my problem and why my post was so wishy-washy. Imagemagick is a pain in the ass for a novice to install plus you must have your own server. I don't know of any possible way for a shared host to install an image processor.

Having said that, you can still have a successful gallery without thumbnails, but the page loads are horrendous. My gallery.php gets over 2000 hits a day from the users browsing each other's photos. I built the script with variables for number of pics per page, num of rows/cols per page, etc.. so if you want to show 4 per page, it would be a bit faster.

DAMN I want it like freddy's, sizing on the fly! We're having our own server built now... (yea, 165 online last night & a shared host! haha I'm query-cache-man! no other way our site would still run)

Yeah too bad indeed. Our dev team has been discussing building our own server (since one of the staff members works at a hosting company), but for now we're all too busy to even start thinking about it seriously.

Have you released your image hack by any chance? That'd be great to have for the time being until something else comes along...

Oh and yeah, Freddie's hack is just about what I'm looking for With a few enhancements like popularity, resolution etc. it'd be perfect!

[Freddie Bingham]

I wrote my gallery in a couple hours to get something up that would categorize all the attachments in one place. I hope to include something with v2.1 that is a but more comprehensive if I have time.

Sweet

I did see the "if", but this feature would really be something man It'd bring a lot of people to vBulletin that's for sure

How exactly would it work though? Separate different types of files into different categories or something in the lines of that? And if you were to create a gallery similar to the one you have on your site, how exactly would you be able to bypass the need for an external application to resize the images? Inserting the images as is, would probably create a lot of problems for large sized images (in pixels).

It'd be great if the user could choose a category to put his files into, rather than have a script doing it automatically according to the file format. The category list could be generated according to the file type one uploads, that way you would reduce the risk of having an image put into the wrong category.

You must be very busy, but I'm just excited someone at least took the interest in this idea

All the luck in case you start developing this for 2.1

Peace,
Phoenix.

[ScottW]

Check out PhotoPost -- it uses the VBulletin user DB:
http://www.techimo.com/photopost/index.html

ImageMagick isn't THAT tough to install in unix.. Most web hosts will help with the install or do it for you. Under IIS, installing ImageMagick is simple with ppm.

[ExcErr]

i like this idea, but remeber, all users files must be saved as FILES! NOT STORE IN DB!!

[Overgrow]

Way to dig up an old thread

For a site that relies on their images, storing them in the DB is not feasible-- they have to be in the file system. It's harder to protect the images in private forums but not impossible.

Update... gallery now gets 40,000 hits a day and uses real thumbnails with Imagemagick routines. Each user has a personal gallery which they control and I have a new postbit routine which displays thumbnails in the forum:

http://www.overgrow.com/edge/gallery.php
http://www.overgrow.com/edge/showthr...5&pagenumber=3

(don't click if easily offended)

[ScottW]

FYI PhotoPost is now 100% PHP, stores its images on disk (so browsers can cache), integrates with vbulletin for one unified login, and integrates with vbulletin and/or vbportal header/footer.

[Jadelit]

yes but I love overgrows threaddisplay.. any way you can tell us how you did it?

[ZiRu$]

dope idea