[Ids-devel] Users' suggestions

[John M. <mo...@mu...>]

Sorry for the long message, but it's jam-packed with good ideas. The
following are user-submitted feature requests I've received over the past
week:

on 2/20/01 7:21 AM, Carlos Jorge Andrade wrote:
> Hi there...
> I'm a fan of your IDS system. :-)
> I've a question that i think is more like a sugestion.
> In the admin zone why can't we DELETE an album ?
> We can rename, add but not delete one. Or can we ?
> 
> Thanks.

This would make the admin interface a lot more useful, but I worry about
making it too easy for someone to accidently delete a lot of photos. Are
there any javascripters in the house? It looks like it would be pretty easy
to add a pop-up confirmation dialog box. (This would be useful in other
places, too.) Do we want to require javascript-capable browsers?

on 2/22/01 2:41 PM, Brett Nemeroff wrote:
> Hey John,
> I've finally got IDS up and running on my webserver. I've actually got two
> sites running IDS now, http://www.nekula.com and http://www.nemeroff.com
> 
> Mine is www.nemeroff.com <http://www.nemeroff.com>  the other one is
> completely password protected. Just as an interesting piece of information, he
> has over 2000 pictures on there and it works great (version 0.52). I love the
> shutterfly feature, haven't used it yet, but want to give it a whirl.
> 
> I had a couple of "simple" recommendations for the program. First of all, I
> saw that in the TODO that you are planning (as a long term goal) to be able to
> run the system globally. so that multiple users could setup their own albums.
> I think this is an excellent recommendation. I currently have to create
> multiple copies of the CGI scripts. I have some other ideas:
> 
> 1. Be able to specify a maximum size for image cache. One the max size is
> reached, it starts overwriting/deleting the last accessed or something
> intellegent like that.
> 2. Files are hard to save from the website.. they end up having all of the
> special characters (like %20 for spaces) is there any way to fix that?? For
> example, goto an IDS site and save a pic to your local computer by right
> clicking on it.
> 3. A description field for each picture would be nice as an option (that you
> could have on every pic or just a few. Empty descriptions wouldn't even show
> up). I know you currently support this in comments, but you have to scroll all
> the way down to the bottom of the picture. And comments get moved around as
> they get added.
> 4. I like the idea also in the TODO for generating statistics such as most
> popular photos, hit counters, etc.
> 5. Maybe the capability of having people subscribe to the photo album to be
> notified of changes?
> 6. Allow a public photo album where anyone can upload pictures. May need
> multiple security levels for this to work.
> 7. Include an option to email IDS admin when someone adds a comment.
> 8. Create the abilty to upload a zip file containing directory structures and
> JPG files. I actually added this functionality in 0.51 but it didn't work for
> long. I think I had a permissions problem. It was about 4 lines of code.
> Basically right after you upload the ZIP file, it checks the extension, if
> it's ZIP it uncompresses it and removes the ZIP file. This is VERY VERY
> useful. In fact, I'd almost say it's extreamly important. I almost never just
> add one picture at a time. So the admin interface is almost useless for me. I
> take 100s of pics on my digital camera (I have a 1G microdrive in my digital
> camera) and then I want to dump all of the pics from the camera into the
> website. I typically stage them on my PC, sort them, zip them, and then it
> would be nice to be able to send it to the "photo server" via a zip file.
> 
> BTW, that last recommendation is the only one I'm really wanting right now.
> 
> Those are my current recommendations. I'm overall very happy with the product.
> I think it's very easy to use, setup and it looks great. Send my thanks to you
> and your team on your great work.
> 
> Thanks again,
> Brett

Several of these ideas sound good to me.

on 2/24/01 4:53 AM, Tom Heady wrote:
> just got IDS running at my family website.
> 
> thought I would give you congrats for the work you have done, this thing is
> great.
> I just got through importing  a bunch of images and comments that were on my
> half assed photo album, and found a few things.
> 
> a couple of things that I would like to see:
> -when editing an image, it would be nice to be able to edit the comments and
> imagename without having to submit twice
> -the ability to mass delete more than one image at a time (mabye from the main
> image page for the album...checkboxes and all)
> -the ability to move an image to another album from the image edit page (mabye
> mass move too, like the delete?)
> -upload multiple images from the web browser. (possible? i dont know if the
> file-upload field allows this...nevermind this wont work :( )
> -add the ability to turn off visibility of ip address and time (or make time
> smaller) in comments to the preferences page
> 
> 
> possible bugs:
> if the image is renamed to end in a "." eg "this is my image name.." it can
> cause problems in the image interface.
> 
> 
> documentation additions:
> I have redhat 6.2
> I could not get the .htaccess to work (never had a need before) so i had to
> look up this bit of info:
> 
> you have to set AllowOverride to AuthConfig (mine was set to None) in the file
> access.conf.
> 
> mine was here: /etc/httpd/conf/
> 
> also my version of apache (1.3.9-4) had problems with the <Limit GET> and
> </Limit> lines in .htaccess, so i removed them
> 
> once you do that then restart apache.  it will then notice your .htaccess file
> 
> http://www.redhat.com/support/docs/faqs/RH-apache-FAQ/c135.html#AEN137
> http://www.apacheweek.com/features/userauth
> 
> thanks again for the great software...hopefully i will get time to contribute!
> ---tom

I'll make the documentation changes, but I thought that the multiple image
selection (maybe checkboxes?) would be a fun idea for someone to play with.

on 2/26/01 7:46 AM, Denis Karpov wrote:
> hello John !
> first of all thank you for that great piece of job you've done on
> IDS image displaying system. it's really looks cool, easy to setup
> and works like a charm.
> 
> there are couple of things i'd like to propose.
> 
> 1. private galleries
> access to some galleries with authentication
> 
> 2. image order in album
> it'd be good to have control of the order of images (thumbnails) in
> the album title page. for now it is possible to do thru filenames only
> (since they are displayed in alphabetic order)
> 
> keep up good work !
> 
> with best regards,
> Denis.

People have been asking for private album support for quite some time, but
I've never been able to come up with a good (elegant & secure) way to
implement it.

John