Topic: Video Gallery Problems

[Dino]

Mike, I sent you my specific URL with a login and password, since the specific gallery I'm referring to is confidential until after the SEMA Show.

I just wanted to document it here, in case others are having the same problem.

My problem is this:

Let's say, for example, that I've set my configuration to show 4 columns, with a max of 24 objects in a directory. If I upload 30 videos, the first page shows that there are two pages of videos (there should be 24 on page 1 and  6 on page 2).

For some reason, when I go to page 2, there's nothing there.

I'm hoping you can repeat this issue on your test album. Try uploading more videos than objects per page, and let me know if the same thing happens to you.

I was able to repeat this phenomenon on two different directories. The only way that I could "see" all the videos was to increase the total objects per page to be larger than the amount of videos.

Has anybody else witnessed this problem on their albums?

[Mike Bobbitt]

Probably no-one else has that many videos.

I'll post the question I sent you here as well, in case anyone else wants to comment on it:

Let me get your opinion on something. The way the pagination currently works is that albums are shown at the top of every page, with videos next and finally photos. The "photos_per_page" config item defines how many objects of all types are displayed on a page. So if it's 20, you might get 4 albums, 10 movies and 6 photos on a given page.

In my opinion, there are better ways to do it, but I'm not sure what the best is. For example, maybe it should be 20 of each type of object on a page. Or the user can define the number of rows for each object to display... Not sure...

What do you think?

Before I fix the pagination bugs, I want to figure out how I want to do pagination at all...

Cheers

[Dino]

My email to Mike:

You pose good questions.

One more thing that I'm not sure I commented on: I tried just adding videos, in addition to photos, in one of the directories. The pagination was really screwy... it actually didn't show several of the photos on the top of the list.

I'm not sure you can allow users to select the number of specific objects (videos, albums, photos) per page. It may be too difficult, and might be functionality that's not worth your time. It would be nice, but I think it's unnecessary. If there was a way to tie in "total" objects per page, IMHO, that would be the best bang for the buck.

Obviously, the best bet would be to allow users to select rows and columns of the "total" object per page, including photos, videos, and albums (and maybe one day links?)

Come to think of it, I think I had a similar problem with too many albums/directories at one point.

Right now, I'm just going to try and limit the total videos.

Is your added functionality of "auto sorting" of multiple objects screwing this up? If so, can you make that function optional in the configuration? I would almost prefer it not there, since my work galleries are very chronological, and it would be kinda nice to have videos and pictures just sorting by filename. Don't take it the wrong way. I do love the auto sorting feature, and I know you probably spent a great deal of time coding that.

Let me know if you'd like more feedback. I'm just honored that you're asking me for my opinion.

Album.pl's biggest fan,

Dino Filias

[Dino]

Mike, I hope you don't mind...

Mike's response:

Hey Dino, thanks for the input. Turns out I really broke pagination when I added the groups, so it's not a problem with the sorting.

I think I may end up going with a "global" columns setting, and allow the number of rows for both movies and photos (and yes, probably eventually links to be set. Albums will be displayed at the top of every page. So a config might look like this:

columns=5
movie_rows=3
pic_rows=10

That way, if there are 3 movies, they don't deduct 3 from the total count, and leave the photos table ending with a row of 2 photos. (That may not make sense, but that's the broken way that it works right now...)

What do you think?

BTW, you can change the sort order to sort by filename, if you want. Just change the "sortby" config item. And if you want only certain albums to sort by filename, just drop a local album.cfg file in those albums, with a sortby (and only a sortby) config item in them.

Cheers

This trick is definitely noteworthy:

BTW, you can change the sort order to sort by filename, if you want. Just change the "sortby" config item. And if you want only certain albums to sort by filename, just drop a local album.cfg file in those albums, with a sortby (and only a sortby) config item in them.

Allowing one to sort specifically (vs. globally) in a photo directory has tremendous value. You should toot your horn on this discovery. I'll do it for you <toot toot>.

[Dino]

Another email to Mike. This one is a work-around I discovered:

I found a work-around. In order to get all my videos to show up, I just created sub dirs: Videos 1-20 and Videos 21-40. Now all the videos show up, since I have more than 20 (which is my global objects per page).

Question: Why does pagination work with picture objects but not with video objects? One would think that if I'm bypassing the grouping thing altogether by creating sub dirs within an album, that the movie objects would behave similar to the picture objects. I'm just curious as to why pagination would affect movies and not pictures.

Dino

[Mike Bobbitt]

Bugs are mysterious things.

I'll figure it out, thanks for hanging in there...

[Mike Bobbitt]

Ok Dino, I think I nailed it. Re-download and replace album.pl and album_strings.txt. Pagination should be all fixed up now, and since you're the best test case I know, I'd love to hear how it goes...

Thanks

[Dino]

Trying it now....

[Dino]

Ummm....

Didn't work. Pagination on photos is gone. Videos show up, but again, all on one page. I'll leave the newer album.pl up, but I'm going to revert back to my last version.

It doesn't paginate photos at all. For example, my El Camino page used to have 21 pages, with 20 photos per page. Now there's only one page with 400 photos.

Anything I can do to help?

[Dino]

I had to revert back to the old version (with pagination) because there are people visiting the gallery tonight that need to see the SEMA Vehicles.

I also went into the configuration section to see if you added another variable, such as "rows", but did not see it there. Perhaps I missed it?

Anyway, keep me posted. I'm off to Vegas on Monday morning for SEMA, and I'll be back on Friday. I'll be available a little bit this weekend to test, if you make any headway.

Thanks for everything!

[Mike Bobbitt]

Yeah, there is a new "rows" config item (in the "display" section, right under "columns"):

Code: [Select]

# Number of rows used to display photos and movies (albums are displayed seperately).
rows=10

Without that config item, it'll show up oddly, I'm sure. Sorry I forgot to mention it!