thanks for this plugin.  it might help me in my application, which is to provide album/galleries which can be edited (ie. new images added, taken away, etc.) through web interface.

> That's my goal eventually, too. Perhaps you can help to
> design/write this plugin? At the moment I'm mostly
> waiting for a design "sanity check" from [[Joey]],
> but any feedback you can provide on the design would
> also be helpful. --[[smcv]]

i have two challenges: firstly, for installation, i'm not sure what all the files are that need to be downloaded (because of my setup i can't easily pull the repo).  so far i have Ikiwiki/Plugins/album.pm; ikiwiki-album; and 4 files in templates/  any others?

> Those are all the added files; ikiwiki-album isn't strictly
> needed (IkiWiki itself doesn't use that code, but you can
> use it to turn a directory full of images into correct
> input for the album plugin).
>
> You probably also want the album plugin's expanded version of
> style.css (or put its extra rules in your local.css).
> Without that, your albums will be quite ugly.
>
> There aren't currently any other files modified by my branch.
> --[[smcv]]

secondly: barring the CGI interface for editing the album, which would be great, is there at least a way to use attachment plugin or any other to manually add images and then create viewers for them?

> Images are just attachments, and viewers are pages (any supported
> format, but .html will be fastest to render). Attach each image,
> then write a page for each image containing the
> \[[!albumimage]] directive (usually it will *only* contain that
> directive).
>
> The script ikiwiki-album can help you to do this in a git/svn/etc.
> tree; doing it over the web will be a lot of work (until I get
> the CGI interface written), but it should already be possible!
>
> The structure is something like this:
> 
> * album.mdwn (contains the \[[!album]] directive, and perhaps also
>   some \[[!albumsection]] directives)
> * album/a.jpg
> * album/a.html (contains the \[[!albumimage]] directive for a.jpg)
> * album/b.jpg
> * album/b.html (contains the \[[!albumimage]] directive for b.jpg)
>
> Have a look at ikiwiki-album to see how the directives are meant to
> work in practice.
>
> --[[smcv]]

i'm new to ikiwiki, apologies if this is dealt with elsewhere.  -brush

> This plugin is pretty ambitious, and is unfinished, so I'd recommend
> playing with  a normal IkiWiki installation for a bit, then trying
> out this plugin when you've mastered the basics of IkiWiki. --[[smcv]]

----

You had wanted my feedback on the design of this. I have not looked at the
code or tried it yet, but here goes. --[[Joey]]	

* Needing to create the albumimage "viewer" pages for each photo
  seems like it will become a pain. Everyone will need to come up
  with their own automation for it, and then there's the question
  of how to automate it when uploading attachments.

> There's already a script (ikiwiki-album) to populate a git
> checkout with skeleton "viewer" pages; I was planning to make a
> specialized CGI interface for albums after getting feedback from
> you (since the requirements for that CGI interface change depending
> on the implementation). I agree that this is ugly, though. -s

* With each viewer page having next/prev links, I can see how you
  were having the scalability issues with ikiwiki's data structures
  earlier!

> Yeah, I think they're a basic requirement from a UI point of view
> though (although they don't necessarily have to be full wikilinks).
> -s

* And doesn't each viewer page really depend on every other page in the
  same albumsection? If a new page is added, the next/prev links
  may need to be updated, for example. If so, there will be much
  unnecessary rebuilding.

> albumsections are just a way to insert headings into the flow of
> photos, so they don't actually affect dependencies.
>
> One non-obvious constraint of ikiwiki's current design is that
> everything "off-page" necessary to build any page has to happen
> at scan time, which has caused a few strange design decisions,
> like the fact that each viewer controls what album it's in.
>
> It's difficult for the contents of the album to just be a
> pagespec, like for inline, because pagespecs can depend on
> metadata, which is gathered in arbitrary order at scan time;
> so the earliest you can safely apply a pagespec to the wiki
> contents to get a concrete list of pages is at rebuild time.
>
> (This stalled my attempt at a trail plugin, too.) -s

* One thing I do like about having individual pages per image is
  that they can each have their own comments, etc.

> Yes; also, they can be wikilinked. I consider those to be
> UI requirements. -s

* Seems possibly backwards that the albumimage controls what album
  an image appears in. Two use cases -- 1: I may want to make a locked
  album, but then anyone who can write to any other page on the wiki can
  add an image to it. 2: I may want an image to appear in more than one
  album. Think tags. So it seems it would be better to have the album
  directive control what pages it includes (a la inline).

> See note above about pagespecs not being very safe early on.
> You did merge my inline-with-pagenames feature, which is safe to use
> at scan time, though.

* Putting a few of the above thoughts together, my ideal album system
  seems to be one where I can just drop the images into a directory and
  have them appear in the album index, as well as each generate their own wiki
  page. Plus some way I can, later, edit metadata for captions,
  etc. (Real pity we can't just put arbitrary metadata into the images
  themselves.) This is almost pointing toward making the images first-class
  wiki page sources. Hey, it worked for po! :) But the metadata and editing
  problems probably don't really allow that.

> Putting a JPEG in the web form is not an option from my point of
> view :-) but perhaps there could just be a "web-editable" flag supplied
> by plugins, and things could be changed to respect it.
>
> In a way, what you really want for metadata is to have it in the album
> page, so you can batch-edit the whole lot by editing one file (this
> does mean that editing the album necessarily causes each of its viewers
> to be rebuilt, but in practice that happens anyway). -s

----

Trying to use the "special extension" design:

Suppose that each viewer is a JPEG-or-GIF-or-something, with extension
".albumimage". We have a gallery "memes" with three images, badger,
mushroom and snake.

Files in git repo:

* index.mdwn
* memes.mdwn
* memes/badger.albumimage (a renamed JPEG)
* memes/badger/comment_1._comment
* memes/badger/comment_2._comment
* memes/mushroom.albumimage (a renamed GIF)
* memes/mushroom.meta (sidecar file with metadata)
* memes/snake.albumimage (a renamed video)

Files in web content:

* index.html
* memes/index.html
* memes/96x96-badger.jpg (from img)
* memes/96x96-mushroom.jpg (from img)
* memes/96x96-snake.jpg (from img, hacked up to use totem-video-thumbnailer :-) )
* memes/badger/index.html (including comments)
* memes/badger.jpg
* memes/mushroom/index.html
* memes/mushroom.gif
* memes/snake/index.html
* memes/snake.mov

ispage("memes/badger") (etc.) must be true, to make the above rendering
happen, so albumimage needs to be a "page" extension.

To not confuse other plugins, album should probably have a filter() hook
that turns .albumimage files into HTML? That'd probably be a reasonable
way to get them rendered anyway.

do=edit&page=memes/badger needs to not put the JPG in a text box: somehow
divert or override the normal edit CGI by telling it that .albumimage
files are not editable in the usual way?

Every image needs to depend on, and link to, the next and previous images,
which is a bit tricky. In previous thinking about this I'd been applying
the overly strict constraint that the ordered sequence of pages in each
album must be known at scan time. However, that's not *necessarily* needed:
the album and each photo could collect an unordered superset of dependencies
at scan time, and at rebuild time that could be refined to be the exact set,
in order. Perhaps restricting to "the images in an album A must match A/*"
would be useful; then the unordered superset could just be "A/*". Your
"albums via tags" idea would be nice too though, particularly for feature
parity with e.g. Facebook: "photos of Joey" -> "tags/joey and albumimage()"
maybe?

If images are allowed to be considered to be part of more than one album,
then a pretty and usable UI becomes harder - "next/previous" expands into
"next photo in holidays/2009/germany / next photo in tagged/smcv / ..."
and it could get quite hard to navigate. Perhaps next/previous links could
be displayed only for the closest ancestor (in URL space) that is an
album, or something?

Requiring renaming is awkward for non-technical Windows/Mac users, with both
platforms' defaults being to hide extensions; however, this could be
circumvented by adding some sort of hook in attachment to turn things into
a .albumimage at upload time, and declaring that using git/svn/... without
extensions visible is a "don't do that then" situation :-)

Ideally attachment could also be configured to upload into a specified
underlay, so that photos don't have to be in your source-code control
(you might want that, but I don't!).

Things that would be nice, and are probably possible:

* make the "Edit page" link on viewers divert to album-specific CGI instead
  of just failing or not appearing
* some way to deep-link to memes/badger.jpg with a wikilink, without knowing a
  priori that it's secretly a JPEG