Review: GRAND FlAGallery

Flash Album Gallery – Introduction

Are you looking for a better way to manage and display photos on your blogs??? Then you must try this fantastic Flash Album Gallery plugin. It provides a comprehensive interface for managing photos and images through a set of admin pages, and it displays photos in a way that makes your web site look very professional.

Flash Album Gallery – Installation

Upload the files to wp-content/plugins/flash-album-gallery.

flagallery-skins folder with skins

flash-album-gallery in the plugins folder

Activate the plugin. Be sure that after activation ‘flagallery-skins’ folder created successfully. If not, create it manually and install skins through admin Skins page or via ftp.

Add a gallery and upload some images (the main gallery folder must have write permission).

Galleries on FTP

Add/Manage Galleries

Insert Shortcode

Go to your post/page and insert shortcode tag easy with FlAGallery button

Insert shortcode

[flagallery gid=all name="Gallery"]

Additional shortcode parameters

If you use gid=all:

[flagallery gid=all name="Gallery" orderby=title order=ASC exclude=3,5]

Insert shortcode with custom sort options

This shortcode will display all galleries (except ID=3 and ID=5) sorted by title, ASC order.

Wanna display only three galleries in specific order? No problem:

[flagallery gid=4,2,5 name="Gallery"]

Above shortcode will display first gallery with ID=4, then with ID=2 and ID=5 in flash categories.

Custom skin parameters in shortcode

Check custom settings when insert shortcode and go to Skin tab:

[flagallery gid=3,4,5 name="Weddings" w=100% h=480 skin=green_style_pro]

Shortcode custom settings

GRAND Flash Album Gallery – Configuration

Before you do anything, go to the Options page. From here you’ll notice a number of options tabs for configuring different parts of the plugin, including General, Thumbnails, Images, Sorting and Roles.

General Options

General Options

• Gallery path. Most people won’t have to change this.
• Default size (W X H). Specifies the default size of the flash. This is the size at which flash are displayed. Height can’t be set with per cent. Defaults to 100% x 500.
• Delete image files. Uncheck if you want to the image files not to be deleted from the FTP when you delete images from a gallery. Enabled by default.

Thumbnails

After making changes to thumbnail options, you will need to regenerate thumbnails in all galleries.

• Width x height (in pixels). Specifies the maximum width and height for thumbnail images. Recommended size is 115 x 100.
• Set fixed dimensions. Ignores the aspect ratio of images and generates a thumbnail to the exact dimensions specified above. Enabled by default.
• Thumbnail quality. This is a percentage of maximum quality. Defaults to 100%.

Images

• Resize images. Specifies the width and height that images will be resized to. These are maximum dimensions and aspect ratio is maintained. Images are only resized when you choose to do that specifically. Images are not resized when you upload them. Defaults to 800 x 600.
• Image quality. This is a percentage of maximum quality. Defaults to 85%.

Sorting

• Sort thumbnails. Specifies how thumbnails are sorted when displayed in a gallery. Defaults to Custom Order.
  • Image ID – Sorts thumbnails by the ID of the image. This works well if you import them in the order you want them displayed.
  • File name – Sorts thumbnails by the name of the image file. This works well if your image files are named the way you want them sorted.
  • Alt/Title text – Sorts thumbnails by the alt/title text specified for each image.
• Sort direction. Specifies the direction for sorting (ascending or descending). Default is Ascending, but if You display all galleries in shortcode default is Descending

Roles

Do you need help with your WordPress gallery? You can assign different roles to allow users to help you. This tutorial will show you how to assign different roles.

• Main Flash Album Gallery overview – This allows for the assigned role to have complete control of the FlAGallery. If there is a user that you want to assign to this position, drop the box down and select the user.
• Use TinyMCE Button / Upload tab – This option allows assigned users to upload images and slideshows. Drop the box down and assign this role to the user of your choice.
• Add gallery / Upload images – With this option, the assigned user can only create galleries and upload images. Again, drop the box down and select the user of your choice for this role.
• Import images folder – This option allows assigned users to import image folders from FTP.
• Manage gallery – This option allows the assigned user to manage the gallery. By managing the gallery, they can delete galleries, edit galleries, and more.
• Manage others gallery – This option allows the assigned user to manage the galleries created by other users. By managing the gallery, they can delete galleries, edit galleries, and more.
• Change skin – The skins option will only allows the assigned users to change the skin of the FlAGallery.
• Add skins – The skins option will only allows the assigned users to add new skins to the FlAGallery.
• Delete skins – The skins option will only allows the assigned users to delete skins through Skins page.
• Change options – This option allows assigned users to change the options of the WordPress gallery. This option gives users a lot of authority too.

After you have assigned the roles to the users of your choice, click the Update button. Be careful when assigning these roles. Someone can mess the entire gallery up if you assign the different options to different users.

Flash Album Gallery – Image Management

Add Gallery

The first thing you will want to do is upload some images. Before you can do that, you have to create a gallery. You do that on the Manage Galleries -> Add Gallery tab. Galleries are created below the path specified on the General Options page, typically wp-content/flagallery/. Creating a gallery actually creates a new folder on the server to store the images.

Add New Gallery

Choose the name of your gallery very carefully as once it’s been created it is very difficult to change it. You’ll have to rename the folder on the server’s disk.

Adding Images

Once you’ve created a gallery you can add images to it. There are two different ways to add images to a gallery, by uploading them and by copying them to a location and then scanning the directory.

Note that when uploading images, check that the php.ini file for your sever sets the maximum file upload size high enough.
Upload images one or more at a time. This is done from the Upload Images tab on the Manage Galleries page. You can select multiple files to upload and see progress of each image as it is being uploaded.

Upload Multiple Images

Import images already in your gallery folder. To do this:

1. Go to the Manage Gallery page.
2. Click on the Edit link for your gallery.
3. Click the Scan Folder for New Images button.

Scan Folder for New Images

Here is a summary of the operations that can be performed on the gallery on the Manage Gallery page.

• Edit the name and description of the gallery.
• Edit the path (although this only changes the path, it doesn’t rename it).
• Delete the gallery.

Managing Images

Once you get images into a gallery, you can perform a number of different operations on them. Probably the first thing you’ll want to do is to annotate them. While you’re at it you may as well add a description to your gallery.

Manage Gallery Images

The Manage Gallery page provides a lot of flexibility and allows you to make a lot of changes at once. One thing you’ll want to be careful of, however, is to avoid doing to many operations that take a lot of time, such as regenerating thumbnails. Doing so can cause the operation to timeout.

Here is a summary of the operations that can be performed on images on the Manage Gallery page.

• Specify a description for each image.
• Specify alternate title text for each image.
• Delete an image. The image file itself will only be deleted if the Delete image files option is enabled on the General Options page.
• Generate new (create custom) thumbnails for selected images. This is especially useful when you change the thumbnail options.
• Resize images. This is useful when you set resize parameters on the Images option page.
• Scan the folder for new images as described above.
• View image meta data.
• Sort images. Only when Custom order option is selected on Options page.
• Lock images for unregistered users.

Skins

Add Skins

Important:
From plugin version 0.40 there is separate folder for skins outside ‘flash-album-gallery’ folder named ‘flagallery-skins’ (see screenshots at the begining of review). Plugin should automatically create this folder and move all skins in it. But some servers don’t let to do that due folder write permissions. So you need manually create ‘flagallery-skins’ folder and click Reset settings on Overview page.

Make sure that one of the skin is active and there must be default skin (Midnight). Never delete default skin (Midnight skin).

Skin Options

Each skin has own color settings, which can be changed here.
Background Color. Specifies the color of the background for flash. Background transparent, if checked option ‘transparent’. You also can specify color of text and buttons and color when rolling over them.

Languages GRAND Flash Album Gallery