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You had wanted my feedback on the design of this. I have not looked at the code or tried it yet, but here goes. --Joey

• Needing to create the albumimage "viewer" pages for each photo seems like it will become a pain. Everyone will need to come up with their own automation for it, and then there's the question of how to automate it when uploading attachments. -J

There's already a script (ikiwiki-album) to populate a git checkout with skeleton "viewer" pages; I was planning to make a specialized CGI interface for albums after getting feedback from you (since the requirements for that CGI interface change depending on the implementation). I agree that this is ugly, though. -s

Would you accept a version where the albumimage "viewer" pages could be 0 bytes long, at least until metadata gets added?

The more I think about the "binaries as first-class pages" approach, the more subtle interactions I notice with other plugins. I think I'm up to needing changes to editpage, comments, attachment and recentchanges, plus adjustments to img and Render (to reduce duplication when thumbnailing an image with a strange extension while simultaneously changing the extension, and to hardlink/copy an image with a strange extension to a differing target filename with the normal extension, respectively). -s

Now that we have add_autofile I can just create viewer pages whenever there's an image to view. The current version of the branch does that. -s

• With each viewer page having next/prev links, I can see how you were having the scalability issues with ikiwiki's data structures earlier! -J

Yeah, I think they're a basic requirement from a UI point of view though (although they don't necessarily have to be full wikilinks). -s

I think that with the new dependency types system, the dependencies for these can be presence dependencies, which will probably help with avoiding rebuilds of a page if the next/prev page is changed. (Unless you use img to make the thumbnails for those links, then it would rebuild the thumbnails anyway. Have not looked at the code.) --Joey

I do use img. -s

• And doesn't each viewer page really depend on every other page in the same albumsection? If a new page is added, the next/prev links may need to be updated, for example. If so, there will be much unnecessary rebuilding. -J

albumsections are just a way to insert headings into the flow of photos, so they don't actually affect dependencies.

One non-obvious constraint of ikiwiki's current design is that everything "off-page" necessary to build any page has to happen at scan time, which has caused a few strange design decisions, like the fact that each viewer controls what album it's in.

It's difficult for the contents of the album to just be a pagespec, like for inline, because pagespecs can depend on metadata, which is gathered in arbitrary order at scan time; so the earliest you can safely apply a pagespec to the wiki contents to get a concrete list of pages is at rebuild time.

(This stalled my attempt at a trail plugin, too.) -s

Not sure I understand why these need to look at pagespecs at scan time? Also, note that it is fairly doable to detect if a pagespec uses such metadata. Er, I mean, I have a cheezy hack in add_depends now that does it to deal with a similar case. --Joey

I think I was misunderstanding how early you have to call add_depends? The critical thing I missed was that if you're scanning a page, you're going to rebuild it in a moment anyway, so it doesn't matter if you have no idea what it depends on until the rebuild phase. -s

• One thing I do like about having individual pages per image is that they can each have their own comments, etc. -J

Yes; also, they can be wikilinked. I consider those to be UI requirements. -s

• Seems possibly backwards that the albumimage controls what album an image appears in. Two use cases -- 1: I may want to make a locked album, but then anyone who can write to any other page on the wiki can add an image to it. 2: I may want an image to appear in more than one album. Think tags. So it seems it would be better to have the album directive control what pages it includes (a la inline). -J

I'm inclined to fix this by constraining images to be subpages of exactly one album: if they're subpages of 2+ nested albums then they're only considered to be in the deepest-nested one (i.e. longest URL), and if they're not in any album then that's a usage error. This would also make prev/next links sane. -s

The current version constrains images to be in at most one album, choosing one arbitrarily (dependent on scan order) if albums are nested. -s

If you want to reference images from elsewhere in the wiki and display them as if in an album, then you can use an ordinary inline with the same template that the album would use, and I'll make sure the templates are set up so this works. -s

Still needs documenting, I've put it on the TODO list on the main page. -s

(Implementation detail: this means that an image X/Y/Z/W/V, where X and Y are albums, Z does not exist and W exists but is not an album, would have a content dependency on Y, a presence dependency on Z and a content dependency on W.)

Perhaps I should just restrict to having the album images be direct subpages of the album, although that would mean breaking some URLs on the existing website I'm doing all this work for... -s

The current version of the branch doesn't have this restriction; perhaps it's a worthwhile simplification, or perhaps it's too restrictive? I fairly often use directory hierarchies like a_festival/saturday/foo.jpg within an album, which makes it very easy to write albumsection filters. -s

• Putting a few of the above thoughts together, my ideal album system seems to be one where I can just drop the images into a directory and have them appear in the album index, as well as each generate their own wiki page. Plus some way I can, later, edit metadata for captions, etc. (Real pity we can't just put arbitrary metadata into the images themselves.) This is almost pointing toward making the images first-class wiki page sources. Hey, it worked for po! But the metadata and editing problems probably don't really allow that. -J

Putting a JPEG in the web form is not an option from my point of view but perhaps there could just be a "web-editable" flag supplied by plugins, and things could be changed to respect it.

Replying to myself: would you accept patches to support hook(type => 'htmlize', editable => 0, ...) in editpage? This would essentially mean "this is an opaque binary: you can delete it or rename it, and it might have its own special editing UI, but you can never get it in a web form".

On the other hand, that essentially means we need to reimplement editpage in order to edit the sidecar files that contain the metadata. Having already done one partial reimplementation of editpage (for comments) I'm in no hurry to do another.

I suppose another possibility would be to register hook functions to be called by editpage when it loads and saves the file. In this case, the loading hook would be to discard the binary and use filter() instead, and the saving conversion would be to write the edited content into the metadata sidecar (creating it if necessary).

I'd also need to make editpage (and also comments!) not allow the creation of a file of type albumjpg, albumgif etc., which is something I previously missed; and I'd need to make attachment able to upload-and-rename. -s

I believe the current branch meets your requirements, by having first-class wiki pages spring into existence using add_autofile to be viewer pages for photos. -s

In a way, what you really want for metadata is to have it in the album page, so you can batch-edit the whole lot by editing one file (this does mean that editing the album necessarily causes each of its viewers to be rebuilt, but in practice that happens anyway). -s

Replying to myself: in practice that doesn't happen anyway. Having the metadata in the album page is somewhat harmful because it means that changing the title of one image causes every viewer in the album to be rebuilt, whereas if you have a metadata file per image, only the album itself, plus the next and previous viewers, need rebuilding. So, I think a file per image is the way to go.

Ideally we'd have some way to "batch-edit" the metadata of all images in an album at once, except that would make conflict resolution much more complicated to deal with; maybe just give up and scream about mid-air collisions in that case? (That's apparently good enough for Bugzilla, but not really for ikiwiki). -s

This is now in the main page's TODO list; if/when I implement this, I intend to make it a specialized CGI interface. -s

Yes, [all metadata in one file] would make some sense.. It also allows putting one image in two albums, with different caption etc. (Maybe for different audiences.) --Joey

Eek. No, that's not what I had in mind at all; the metadata ends up in the "viewer" page, so it's necessarily the same for all albums. -s

It would probably be possible to add a new dependency type, and thus make ikiwiki smart about noticing whether the metadata has actually changed, and only update those viewers where it has. But the dependency type stuff is still very new, and not plugin friendly .. so only just possible, --Joey

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Suppose that each viewer is a JPEG-or-GIF-or-something, with extension ".albumimage". We have a gallery "memes" with three images, badger, mushroom and snake.

An alternative might be to use ".album.jpg", and ".album.gif" etc as the htmlize extensions. May need some fixes to ikiwiki to support that. --Joey

foo.albumjpg (etc.) for images, and foo._albummeta (with keepextension => 1) for sidecar metadata files, seems viable. -s

Files in git repo:

• index.mdwn
• memes.mdwn
• memes/badger.albumjpg (a renamed JPEG)
• memes/badger/comment_1._comment
• memes/badger/comment_2._comment
• memes/mushroom.albumgif (a renamed GIF)
• memes/mushroom._albummeta (sidecar file with metadata)
• memes/snake.albummov (a renamed video)

Files in web content:

• index.html
• memes/index.html
• memes/96x96-badger.jpg (from img)
• memes/96x96-mushroom.gif (from img)
• memes/96x96-snake.jpg (from img, hacked up to use totem-video-thumbnailer )
• memes/badger/index.html (including comments)
• memes/badger.jpg
• memes/mushroom/index.html
• memes/mushroom.gif
• memes/snake/index.html
• memes/snake.mov

ispage("memes/badger") (etc.) must be true, to make the above rendering happen, so albumimage needs to be a "page" extension.

To not confuse other plugins, album should probably have a filter() hook that turns .albumimage files into HTML? That'd probably be a reasonable way to get them rendered anyway.

I guess that is needed to avoid preprocess, scan, etc trying to process the image, as well as eg, smiley trying to munge it in sanitize. --Joey

As long as nothing has a filter() hook that assumes it's already text... filters are run in arbitrary order. We seem to be OK so far though.

If this is the route I take, I propose to have the result of filter() be the contents of the sidecar metadata file (empty string if none), with the [[!albumimage ]] directive (which no longer requires arguments) prepended if not already present. This would mean that meta directives in the metadata file would work as normal, and it would be possible to insert text both before and after the viewer if desired. The result of filter() would also be a sensible starting point for editing, and the result of editing could be diverted into the metadata file. -s

do=edit&page=memes/badger needs to not put the JPG in a text box: somehow divert or override the normal edit CGI by telling it that .albumimage files are not editable in the usual way?

Something I missed here is that editpage also needs to be told that creating new files of type albumjpg, albumgif etc. is not allowed either! -s

Every image needs to depend on, and link to, the next and previous images, which is a bit tricky. In previous thinking about this I'd been applying the overly strict constraint that the ordered sequence of pages in each album must be known at scan time. However, that's not necessarily needed: the album and each photo could collect an unordered superset of dependencies at scan time, and at rebuild time that could be refined to be the exact set, in order.

Why do you need to collect this info at scan time? You can determine it at build time via pagespec_match_list, surely .. maybe with some memoization to avoid each image in an album building the same list. I sense that I may be missing a subtelty though. --Joey

I think I was misunderstanding how early you have to call add_depends as mentioned above. -s

Perhaps restricting to "the images in an album A must match A/" would be useful; then the unordered superset could just be "A/". Your "albums via tags" idea would be nice too though, particularly for feature parity with e.g. Facebook: "photos of Joey" -> "tags/joey and albumimage()" maybe?

If images are allowed to be considered to be part of more than one album, then a pretty and usable UI becomes harder - "next/previous" expands into "next photo in holidays/2009/germany / next photo in tagged/smcv / ..." and it could get quite hard to navigate. Perhaps next/previous links could be displayed only for the closest ancestor (in URL space) that is an album, or something?

Ugh, yeah, that is a problem. Perhaps wanting to support that was just too ambitious. --Joey

I propose to restrict to having images be subpages of albums, as described above. -s

Requiring renaming is awkward for non-technical Windows/Mac users, with both platforms' defaults being to hide extensions; however, this could be circumvented by adding some sort of hook in attachment to turn things into a .albumimage at upload time, and declaring that using git/svn/... without extensions visible is a "don't do that then" situation

Or extend pagetype so it can do the necessary matching without renaming. Maybe by allowing a subdirectory to be specified along with an extension. (Or allow specifying a full pagespec, but I hesitate to seriously suggest that.) --Joey

I think that might be a terrifying idea for another day. If we can mutate the extension during the attach upload, that'd be enough; I don't think people who are skilled enough to use git/svn/..., but not skilled enough to tell Explorer to show file extensions, represent a major use case. -s

Ideally attachment could also be configured to upload into a specified underlay, so that photos don't have to be in your source-code control (you might want that, but I don't!).

Replying to myself: perhaps best done as an orthogonal extension to attach? -s

Yet another non-obvious thing this design would need to do is to find some way to have each change to memes/badger._albummeta show up as a change to memes/badger in recentchanges. -s

Things that would be nice, and are probably possible:

• make the "Edit page" link on viewers divert to album-specific CGI instead of just failing or not appearing (probably possible via pagetemplate)

• some way to deep-link to memes/badger.jpg with a wikilink, without knowing a priori that it's secretly a JPEG (probably harder than it looks - you'd have to make a directive for it and it's probably not worth it)

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bug: unable to vary thumbnail size

Hi smcv, great plugin. I am an ikiwiki newbie but so far I've had success using your plugin. I've integrated the jquery masonry plugin into the albumitem template and it works great. But is there a way to create thumnails of different sizes? I've passed thumnailsize option and value to album directive and while it does create the new thumbnail sizes it doesn't use them, The 96x96 thumbnails still appear on the page no matter what I do. - jaime

Fixed in album5 branch, thanks to KathrynAndersen. --smcv

failed installation

Hi, the plugin looks great, but I am probably too dumb to use it ;( here is what I did: created page gal.mdwn with just [[!album]] directive (no arguments) and subdirectory gal/ with images in form img_1234.jpg

when I run ikiwiki, I get something completely wrong though:

generated gal/index.html page contains following code repeated for every image:

<div class="album-viewer">
  <div id="album-img">
    <div class="album-finish">
      <a href="./"><span class="album-arrow">↑</span></a>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

So no links to any images, etc.

The pages for individual images are generated though, but also not correct. Trails section is perfect, but the main part is wrong:

<div class="album-prev">
  <a><span class="album-arrow">â†<90></span></a><br />
  <div class="album-thumbnail">
    <span class="selflink">
      <img src="./96x96-img_2913.jpg" width="96" height="72" alt="img 2913" title="img 2913" class="img" /></span>
  </div>
</div>

This really seems like this should be in the album page and not individul page. It is only thumbnail and not full image. Also the full image is not in the generated html tree at all!

I am using ikiwiki 3.20130518, and got the album sources from the links of this page (part manual installation)

Any hint about what do I do wrong?

Thanks Lukas

This plugin is not really finished. I probably need to update it for current ikiwiki. I'll try to update it (and also update my demo and installation instructions) at some point. --smcv

I have to appologize, I accidentally copied the template wrongly and that caused all the issues ;( So now after two days debugging and tracing, I just fixed that and it works. Well, at least a learnt a lot about ikiwiki internal Thanks for all the work you did on the plugin! --Lukas

bug + patch: not all images shown on album page

Hi smcv, we spoke on irc the other day. Passed show => "0" on line 126 in album.pm to remove the limit on the thumbnails shown on the album page. Setting it on the album directive didn't work.

--kjs

That sounds like a correct solution. I'll fix that in my branch when I work on this again. --smcv

Fixed in album5 branch --s

bug: thumbnailsize doesn't work

As mentioned above by Jaime setting the thumbnailsize doesn't catch either. Or rather if I git push after changing the album directive the generated thumbnails (the image files) are the correct size as set in the directive. The html however uses the default thumbnailsize as hardcoded in album.pm and has broken thumbnails as it links to a file with the default size in the filename.

KathrynAndersen fixed this, see below. --smcv

Fixed in album5 branch --s

Issuing ikiwiki --rebuild knocks the system into another gear where the thumbnails show up correctly but this is only due to the html being the same as above (linking to hardcoded thumbnailsize) but the generated thumbnail images are now matching the hardcoded size ignoring the thumbnailsize attribute on the album directive.

For me this behaviour is way beyond my skills to sort out (I'm no coder). The albumplugin ikiwiki combo is very attractive to me and the plugin i soo close to working!

--kjs

suggested fix for thumbnail size bug

I've tracked down the "always showing the 96x96 thumbnails" bug!

The problem is in the pagetemplate function, which calls "thumbnail" to determine the name of the thumbnail image to use. As you know, the "img" method of generating thumbnails includes the size of the thumbnail as part of its name (to ensure that resizing thumbnails will create a new file of the correct size). The problem is... that in the pagetemplate function, the thumbnailsize is NOT passed in to the call to "thumbnail", so it always returns the default size, 96x96. Hence nothing that anyone can do will change the thumbnails to anything else. Oh, the different-sized thumbnail images ARE created, but they're never linked to.

Here's a context-diff of my fix:

*** /home/kat/files/repos/ikiwiki_smcv/IkiWiki/Plugin/album.pm  2013-12-18 14:50:06.861623226 +1100
--- album.pm    2013-12-18 15:51:09.393582879 +1100
***************
*** 484,489 ****
--- 484,490 ----
        my $viewer = $params{page};
        my $album = $pagestate{$viewer}{album}{album};
        my $image = $pagestate{$viewer}{album}{image};
+                 my $thumbnailsize = $pagestate{$album}{album}{thumbnailsize};
  
        return unless defined $album;
        return unless defined $image;
***************
*** 495,501 ****
  
        if ($template->query(name => 'thumbnail')) {
            $template->param(thumbnail =>
!               thumbnail($viewer, $params{destpage}));
        }
        if (IkiWiki::isinlinableimage($image)
            && ($template->query(name => 'imagewidth') ||
--- 496,502 ----
  
        if ($template->query(name => 'thumbnail')) {
            $template->param(thumbnail =>
!               thumbnail($viewer, $params{destpage}, $thumbnailsize));
        }
        if (IkiWiki::isinlinableimage($image)
            && ($template->query(name => 'imagewidth') ||

-- KathrynAndersen

I haven't tried this change, but it seems sane. I'll apply it when I next work on this plugin.

(OOI: why not a unified diff? The VCS world seems to have settled on those as universal, and I find them easier to read.)

--smcv

Fixed in album5 --s

bug: inability to show more than 10 items

I've found another bug. The album plugin doesn't allow one to have more than 10 items in an album section. This is because it uses "inline" to display album sections, and the default for inline is to show only 10 items. So it only shows 10 items.

What would be good is if the album directive could have a "show" parameter which is passed on to preprocess_inline, so that users could decide how many items to show (including ALL of them, if they give show=0).

-- KathrynAndersen

My intention was that all items would always be shown, so I would always pass show => 0 to preprocess_inline (as kjs suggested above), but that must have got lost somewhere. I'll apply it next time I work on this plugin.

An optional show parameter would be a possible enhancement beyond that, although I don't know how useful it would be; if it isn't passed, the default should be 0 (unlimited). --smcv

Fixed in album5 --s

cbaines' commit to change default thumbnail size

Regarding commit Change the default thumbnail size: as far as I understand it, size => 96x96 is meant to set the image size to be as large as possible given these constraints: width ≤ 96px, height ≤ 96px, and the original aspect ratio is preserved. So I would hope that 96x96 doesn't distort the thumbnails. What distortion are you seeing, and which versions of Imagemagick and Perlmagick are you using?

--smcv

I rebuilt the examples using both your album4 and album5 branches, and I only see this in the album4 branch. So this is probably ok to ignore. --cbaines

OK, I'll assume that was a duplicate of an earlier patch, probably the one from KathrynAndersen. --s