Multiple Categories

[StuartDH]

We're already running vba gallery and like it a lot, but we're finding that as the gallery grows we really need to be able to organise it more, by breaking down the categories in to easy to manage groups.

Essentially, this will require the facility to post one upload into multiple categories, but searching through the various requests for this feature on these forums, it still doesn't look as though there are any plans for it in vba gallery.

Could you confirm if there is/isn't a roadmap for multiple categories. Without it, it looks as though we'll almost definitely be moving to Photopost and I just thought I'd check before making the switch.

Thanks

Stuart

[StuartDH]

Any idea?

[KW802]

StuartDH,

I'll leave this answer up to Brian. I know it's been a feature talked about but I don't know where it sits on the product road map.

Unfortunatly at this time I can't say when/if that might be a feature.

[PhoenixDown21]

You may want to create a multiple choice select box with the different catagories the user would like the image to appear under, then hard link a search for images under those catagories in your gallery index page.

[StuartDH]

Thanks for replies and suggestions guys.

I've just been looking at some of the other gallery apps to see how they do this and notice that Coppermine can create categories that use multiple instances of one original upload based on the keywords associated with the image.

Would this be possible with vba Gallery, by creating hard links to keyword search results? If so, could anyone give me some idea of how I could do it.

Thanks

Stuart

[PhoenixDown21]

Yeah - tahts kind of what I was hinting at earlier.

[StuartDH]

Great. So if I add the word "blue" to the keywords of several images, could you tell me what code I would need to create a link that would show all "blue" images. Also, is it possible to do this with multiple keywords to get all "blue" + "rare" + "birds" etc

Thanks for the help

Stuart

[StuartDH]

A bit of trial and error and I found that it's easy enough to do by creating a link that ends in something like:

search.php?do=searchresults&string=rare+birds+blue&catid=0&quicksearch=1

[StuartDH]

The more I look at this, the more I think that this could be the perfect way to organise our gallery.

The problem we've got is the enormous number of categories that we can place the photos in. We're a wildlife charity that covers every single aspect of nature and the great outdoors. If we just take the wildflowers as an example, a single photo could fit in to one or more of 30 different habitats, one or two of a dozen colours, 20 different leaf shapes, 20 flower-head types, 5 height groups and another 5 groups for rarity.

As a result, a drop-down multi-select list would be very long indeed and probably quite hard to navigate.

Is there a way we can use an HTML form page to group the species instead? The page could include all of the above options with checkboxes, and have the advantage of illustrating an option rather than just naming it - which would be especially useful for leaf shape etc.

If we could do this then we would have one killer multi-category system.

[StuartDH]

Any ideas on how we can do this? A link to a pop-up form page would be ideal.