</p><p align="justify">(As you explore: Pick a photo, click on the thumbnail image, and then click on the intermediate image. That'll take you to the full-size version of the photo.)
</p><p>hmmm hmmm, hmmm-hmmm-hmmm, di-di-dee, di-di-dah.....
</p><p align="justify">Ah, you're back! As you can see, I've installed a photo gallery that is linked to our forums. After logging in *here*, you can then go over *there* to upload photos, rate or comment on others' photos, build a list of your favorites, etc.
</p><p align="justify">You don't have permissions to do any of that UNLESS you are a registered CHGPA forum user, *AND* you are logged in. If you just want to visit and look around, you can do that anytime by surfing to this URL: http://galleries.chgpa.org
</p><p align="justify">There are still a few bugs to work out. For example, there's no link from the gallery back to the forum. And if you logout from within the gallery itself, you are taken to our homepage rather than back to the forum. These navigational issues will be resolved at some point, when I have time.
</p><p align="justify">Oh yeah, both the forum and gallery use "cookies" to know that you are logged in. So your browser has to be set to "Allow Cookies".
</p><hr></hr><center>Does The World Really Need Another Gallery?</center>
<p align="justify">Ok, so you've looked around and now you're asking "Why bother?". After all, there are all kinds of popular photo-sharing sites out there with way more features... That may be true, but:
</p><ul><li>I think having our own gallery makes our website more dynamic and more fun. Our forums are great, but I bet people would like more ways to contribute to the website. A gallery is a great way to do that.
<li>The gallery is a natural place to memorialize club events like fly-ins, parties, and projects.
<li>We could hold our own photo contests, with pilots sending only the "best of their best".
<li>If you use one of the photo-sharing sites, you can upload a few of your choicest images to the CHGPA gallery and provide links to your more complete album. Here's an example of a photo where I've used that trick: http://galleries.chgpa.org/displayimage.php?pos=-37
<li>We could use photos in the gallery to help select which ones are used for (say) a club calendar. Or a poster montage. Or whatever!
<li>Can you say... No advertisements?
</ul></p><hr></hr><center>Bytes, Megas, And Gigas</center>
<p align="justify">We can't provide anywhere near the storage space that webshots, flickr, photobucket, picasa, etc. can offer. Unfortunately, we have to *pay* for space and bandwidth via our web-hosting plan. Since we're trying to keep costs low for the club, we currently can offer only about a gigabyte for photos.
</p><p align="justify">But a gig can go a long way! Here's a photo of mine that I uploaded:
http://galleries.chgpa.org/displayimage.php?pos=-8
The thumbnail, intermediate, and full-size image require 315,716 bytes. I think that the full-size image is pretty decent, even though it's less than 300kb. If 100 club members each uploaded 20 pics of similar size and resolution (316kb x 20 x 100), that would require 632,000,000 bytes. Not much more than half a gig, which we can definitely handle.
</p><p align="justify">If we double that 632MB to 1.2GB, each member could upload 40 pics. And if only about half of the membership are active contributers, then they could upload more like 80 photos. Not too bad, at least for a start!
</p><p align="justify">With these stats in mind, uploaded photos cannot be more than 300kb in size, and each club member has a total quota of 6MB for images. These figures will be tweaked as we gain experience and people start using the gallery.
</p><p align="justify">Of course, if we decide that we really LIKE having our own photo gallery, we as a club could choose to pay a bit more for our hosting plan. And then maybe we could support 200 photos per person, or even video clips. I guess we'll see what develops (so to speak
).</p><hr></hr><center>Ya Get What Ya Pay For</center>
<p align="justify">Our gallery software doesn't provide the "social networking" features that some of the big photo-sharing sites have. No "friends", no "fans", no interaction with others while online. And we can't provide extra services, like prints and posters.
</p><p align="justify">However, you *can* rate people's photos, and comment on them, and add them to an album of your favorites. Not bad, especially given that Coppermine is free software.
</p><hr></hr><center>Uploads Require Approval</center>
<p align="justify">In a future post, I'll provide some details about the uploading procedure and various gallery tips and tricks. But don't let that stop you from exploring : login at the forums, go to the gallery, then click the little 'home' icon at the upper left, on the toolbar at the top of the page. Click on 'Upload file' from the drop down menu that is displayed, and then you're on your way!
</p><p align="justify">NOTE: For now, uploads require admin (that's me!) approval before you will see your photos in the gallery. Sorry about that (and the resulting delays); I want to see how things go before opening the floodgates.
</p><hr></hr><center>This Is Your Gallery!</center>
<p align="justify">At the moment, there isn't much structure to the gallery. There are albums for hang gliding and paragliding photos; an album for uploading photos from club-related events; and there are a few event-specific albums that I created from the old (non-interactive) CHGPA photo gallery.
</p><p align="justify">But this is not set in stone. We could create sub-albums within HG and PG for launches, landing, and in-flight photos. Or we could have those three categories, but put both HG and PG photos in each of them. Or we could do something entirely different.
</p><p align="justify">Coppermine also allows individual users to have their own albums, and once a user's top-level album is created, any number of sub-albums (for a specific day of flying; for non-flying events, you name it) can then be configured.
</p><p align="justify">I've kept the structure simple for now, and I've disabled the feature allowing each individual to have their own album (until/unless we decide to devote more gigs and dollars to the gallery). Please give some thought to what you would like to see, and perhaps we'll discuss future directions at our next club meeting.
</p><p>In the meantime... Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Enjoy!
MarkC
</p>