Photopost & IPB 2.1.x

[Crewleader]

Hello,
Please forgive me if some or all of these questions have been answered - if this is the case, please point me in the right direction & accept my apologies. In the mean time, here goes.

At the moment I am running a forum on IPB 2.0.3 with IG (Invision Gallery) 1.3.1. The gallery has close to 1500 images in it currently. I would like to upgrade the forums to 2.1 since there are some very nice features that I would like to take advantage of. So with that in mind, here are my questions:

1. For anyone familiar with IG, how integrated is Photopost in comparison? Out of the box? With some/heavy modification?
2. Is it a problem to have IG installed alongside Photopost?
3. Does anyone out there have experience with a good converter? If so, how much info did you retain & how much did you lose (comments, views, etc.)?
4. Skins - will Photopost pick up the skin from the forums or will I need to completely build/rebuild it to mimic the forums? I'll be running a highly customized skin on the upgraded forum, so I don't know if this is a problem.
5. How many different search variables within the gallery are there? One problem with IG is that even with 2.0.x you can only search by caption or description, no search by member is available.
6. How about links to a member's gallery in both the topic & profile views? Is this possible? Will it differentiate if the person doesn't have a gallery set up?
7. How about a random image script for the portal (currently running IPB's portal on the testforum with their random gallery script from IG)?
8. Will a member have to log into the gallery separately or will it pull the login information from the forums?
9. Can you re-order &/or move images within an album or between albums/categories? With IG none of this is possible.
10. Can you lock out groups other than guests?
11. Is there a "private" album option & if so can you as an admin turn that option off?
12. Is there notification via email or pm for new comments &/or images for albums that you subscribe to?
13. Is there a trial available that I can try out before either buying or activating? Like I said, I have a testforum that I can put things like this through their paces before installing on the live board. It makes things sooooo much easier. If not, is there a money-back guarantee?
14. Can you set daily bandwidth limits/allowances per group? Or perhaps limit the actual number of images they can view? On the same note, can you set it to where a group can just see the thumbnails but not the full sized images?
    
    This one may be a little confusing, sorry....
    
    
15. Is there any sort of main gallery page per member that would list all of that member's albums? If so, is it possible to sort a category or Member's Gallery in that fashion (by member)? Right now with IG we are set up to allow 1 member group more than 1 album. That's fine in my mind to help keep their pictures organized. The problem is that in the Member's Gallery or any category for that matter, you get those multiple albums showing up instead of 1 link to a person's main gallery page, or at least to those albums posted in that category. And there's no way to create albums within a main album. It ends up taking up a lot more room, visually speaking.
16. Also, if a person creates an album in a Category (rather than the Member's Gallery), it shows the scattered images rather than the album on the user's main gallery/album page. This looks cluttered IMO. I would like for all albums, whether they are created in a category or within the actual Member's Galleries to show up as albums on that member's gallery page. Does that make sense?
17. On a similar topic, if a member creates an album in a category (rather than the Member's Gallery), is it set up to where only they have access to edit/delete/upload to that album (other than mods & admins that is) or does it give access to everyone?

Anyway, there are probably more questions to come, but that's probably enough to swallow for now. Thanks in advance for any help and/or advice that you can send my way. I'm fed up with IG & ready to move on.

[Chuck S]

Well lets take each one specifically

1. I can not speak specifically on Invision Gallery but my understanding is it has a very limited feature set compared with our product. Now I can tell you how our program operates. It uses the invisionboard login and you are able to load the stylesheet calls from invisionboard over photopost. You would still need to make whatever header and footer to load over photopost.

2. No

3. There is no such convertor that I know of.

4. As noted above YES but all skins must be exported as files and be in the style_images directory which is the Invision default directory to export stylesheets to.

5. You can search by title, description, all fields(all search photos table fields like extra fields keywords), comments, username, date range, specific category or multiple cats or all and whether it contains at least one word or all words on a multiple word entry search

6. This would be an invisionboard hack to mod the forum templates

7. You can search our modifications forum and see if someone has written one for invisionboard. I do beleive there is one such animal in those sections for invision

8. INTEGRATED LOGIN

9. You can move images between cats or albums there is a move box when viewing the photo as admin and a user can edit a photo and there will be a cat move box to move the photo if you allow moving of photos

10. Administration permissions is based on usergroups so you can set who can do what

11. Yes there is private albums and public ones and the admin can choose to allow albums or not allow albums per usergroup.

12 YES

13. There is like so many PHP scripts no trial version since once you have the code you have it sorry.

14. You can set per usergroup the following restrictions.
a. upload limit per day number of images
b. Maximum allowable filesize
c. Max diskspace they can use

15. A members gallery link is in this format

http://www.photopost.com/photopost/s...user=1&cat=500

here is the member gallery link

http://www.photopost.com/photopost/s...ry.php?cat=500

16. You can assign albums to cats in our program but on our showgallery page the images are set in there own place not scattered with the cat images

17. If you give moderators permission to delete images then they can. Now admins have permission to delete anything. It is all up to how you set things.