Gallery2/Simple Viewer Album Viewer
A few years back I discovered Gallery2 as a mechanism for do-it-yourself'ers
(like myself) for hosting picture albums. But as time went on, many people
expressed displeasure with the plethora of links that populated the page.
As a result, very little of the screen real estate went towards viewing
the pictures.
Eventually I ran across
Simple Viewer around the time
Flash based album viewers were starting to gain popularity. As a pet
project, I decided to take my existing
Gallery2 albums and view them using SimpleViewer. After some initial
prototyping and playing around, I settled on a
DOJO Toolkit based tree viewer solution combined with the freely available
Viewer solution provided by AirTight Interactive.
The result is a frame based solution with a File System like Album Tree in the
left frame and the actual album displayed in the right frame. I originally
wanted to use a DOJO content pane instead of frames, but I couldn't figure
out how to make SimpleViewer work correctly when all of its infrastructure
for images was in a separate directory than the one being served. I like the
final outcome, and hopefully so do other people. The Gallery2 albums are still
there, since they provide features I don't have an interest in replicating
(like printing via Shutterfly),
so all the old capabilty is not lost--just a little harder to find.
If I get enough interest in this solution, I'll consider posting the scripts
I use to generate this viewer from Gallery2.