dMw Gallery

[smilodon]

As many will probably know when we upgraded to VBulletin 4 we lost the link to our old dMw gallery. The old gallery allowed us to use our forum I.D's to log into the gallery and to organise and show images as if the gallery was part of our dMw  forum. The truth was however that it was in fact a separate standalone application. Since then we have upgraded to V4 and moved from a LAMP server to one that runs Microsoft. Sadly while we have a number of admins who are demons with a Linux server we're a little less geared up for hacking about with Microsoft's offering. So we're not able to pull the old gallery back into our forum's.

The existing gallery features built into this message board isn't really what we're looking for either. We can upload images to our own galleries but there's no easy way for others to see new photo posts or receive meaningful updates when photo's are added. 'What's New' doesn't provide any info about new pictures, which seems a bit rubbish to me but there you go.

We could install a third party plugin that would bring back all the gallery features we need. However it's about £150 a year to licence it and I think it's clear that there is only a relatively small subset of the community that would use a gallery feature. So we can't really justify the cost and admin time to set it up and keep it running.

Therefore we're looking at a separate service for sharing LAN pictures, our personal pics etc that lives outside the dMw web site. Google+ and Picasa are nice services but there's no way to create a centralised group that we can join and control access to. Deviant Art also doesn't seem to offer a 'group' facility. So the choice narrows down to Flickr. Most snappers amongst us probably already have an account, it's trivial to set one up and the group feature allows us to create a set up where we can share pics and control who can join our group, see our images and post comments. I imagine we'd still have to post a update in this forum whenever we added images to our group, and there are several options for embedding Flickr images into forum posts here, so I hope it will be a workable set up for us.

So we now have an invite group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/deadmenwalking/

While I'd have liked to have had a nice gallery built into the web site the good people at VBulletin didn't agree :sideways: . Of course Flickr isn't perfect (the interface is a bit clunky and we can't really theme our groups look) so if anyone knows of a better photo sharing site that provided the group feature we need and the control over access I'm all ears. Oh and it needs to be free or very cheap to run.

Whatever we decide for our final gallery choice, once we're set I'll bring over as many of the old gallery images as I can, specifically the LAN stuff.

Thoughts, ideas, alternatives?

[Blunt]

Thoughts, ideas, alternatives?                   

How about our FB group page?

[smilodon]

That would work, other than the group just has a tab for photo's. As far as I can see everything drops straight in there. There's no real ability to structure anything into galleries or show comment threads. I think Flickr being a dedicated photo site has more options. Then again I'm not too familiar with Facebook's group feature. If it offers  a way to see and comment on images and a decent way to organise stuff it's worth a look. I'll admit I'm pretty anti Facebook so i might be being biased

[sulky_uk]

also make it a closed group and only membes can see whats on there

[faust82]

Gallery yay!
Facebook nay!

Personally I don't like Facebook much, but I have an account that I visit from time to time. Not all members do.

What would be optimal is an integrated gallery solution on the page/forums. That would make everything easier to find, with a single login and reduce fragmentation of community content. With presences on both our own site and FB, you'll have people using just the one or the other. The focus must be on getting as many members as possible active on the site, while relying as little as possible on outside sites.

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[smilodon]

Which is my point. It would cost us over £140 to buy the feature for this message board. So far the Flickr group has three sign ups. So I really don't think from the feedback we have had so far that there is going to be a lot of people using a photo feature. Therefore spending that much money doesn't seem fair or right for the rest of the community. Therefore Flickr is the option we've gone for.

Of course if loads of people start using Flickr we might be able to make a case for buying the plugin.

[faust82]

140 pounds? Someone is making good money off us

Given that, Flickr it is. At least they have several auth methods, so one can choose

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[smilodon]

Oops i wasn't quite accurate on prices $129.00 to buy, another $129.00 to remove the branding and $89.00 a year to get the updates and patches

http://techimo.stores.yahoo.net/photlic.html

[faust82]

I should get a good connection and get in on this hosting racket


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