Gmedia PhotoCluster tag and/or category

[csilig]

Hi There!

I’m trying to setup a web page for my photo collections. I bought GmediaGallery Pro and Gmedia PhotoCluster becasue the demo sites and the description showed me the functionalities what I dreamed off. After long and different way of setting I mad, because it doesn’t match with the demo site and doesn’t support my concept. The idea is that:
I would like to have a page where I show my albums and special filtered contents to visitors in the following example shows the structure:
– Albums
o Indochina
o India
o…..
– Thematic categories
o Portrays
o Nature photos
o Serieses
i. Report zc
i. Report xy
…..

I hope the a.m concept is trivial and nobody will try to convince me to change! This concept also determines some key elements. The number one is that even my albums are organized by locations (like countries) the images are also belong to different thematic categories. E.g. I used to take portrays in different countries and also taking pictures from landscapes and nature.

What I have tried:
1. I setup albums according to locations
2. I setup a Gallery which contains all my location based albums
3. I used AlbumsView with this gallery and its fine (but I still not understand why shall I change the whole module if I need to show the EXIF data. AlbumStripes does it but the thumbnail handling not as good as the AlbumsView has.)
4. After that I tried to setup a new gallery which is collect category based pictures. That was not clear, because nowhere written how to do it! I thought maybe it will work if I create a gallery from galleries. Therefore I setup
4.a. A new gallery for every category like portray, landscape etc.
4.b. I setup another gallery (call it collection) which query tried to refer category based galleries and here my problems started even I had thematic galleries, but I didn’t find any query fields which i need to use in the collection gallery definition.
4.c. Therefore I introduced a user field in every category based galleries which had the same value (Field name was TF and the values were in each category based gallery = Thematic)
4.d In the collection gallery I setup the query to use the new field as a filter and setup AlbumViews (first) as the moduleto use and I expected to show up each category galleries on the AlbumView slider. But the didn’t. I made several different trial, but was useless.
After that I found the PhotoCluster demo site where showd the AlbumView opening page with the categories beneath in red (https://codeasily.com/gmedia/g/8EBKl). I changed my concept and thought this solution will acceptable even it is not the same what I planned. I purchased this extra module and started to setup.
5. Due to the new concept I thought it’s enough if I set the module to my original album gallery and I’m expected to see under the albums slider the red categories (as it was promised on this site (https://codeasily.com/portfolio/gmedia-gallery-modules/photocluster/)). But not! The only thing what I could achieve is that to display tags (therefore I had to set tags according to my categories in each images) inside one album! But even I was little long I hope it’s understandable what I have dreamed off and what is my problem!

I appreciate for any help or proven ideas how to make my galleries appearing as I wish!

Thanks for everybody!
Best ragards
László from Budapest
PS: Currently this web site is offline, because I’m using my Synology server to put together the working frame of site and after it I will move to a public server. The WP template was the one of the default Twenty seventeen.

[Alex]

1. The category is the same as the album, only in the category there is no author (owner). The categories in the Gmedia plugin are used as global collections for general use by several authors. For this reason, we do not filter photos in an album by categories.
2. If you have only one author on your site and you want to use PhotoCluster module you should use tags (as you used categories). You can create tags and add them to the images as easy as you do it with categories. The difference between tags and categories are: categories has description and cover image.

[csilig]

Thanks Alex for your help! Do I understand correctly if I say Gmedia AlbumsView module will be able to handle categories like albums if I setup a gallery which is querying my categories from each albums? I will try it anyway.

How about the other issue regarding the PhotoCluster? Do you have any experence about it?
Does the Gmedia Gallery modules have a detailed help documentation which contains “how to…” sections? I found the web quite weak about it.
Thanks a lot!
Best regards
László from Budapest

[Alex]

Each photo in the Gmedia library can only be in one Gmedia album, but it can be in several Gmedia categories (unlimited) and have many Gmedia tags (unlimited)

You can create a gallery as a splashpage containing Gmedia albums or only Gmedia categories. These modules (AlbumsView and PhotoCluster) can show Gmedia albums covers or/and Gmedia category covers or/and Gmedia tags (buttons) at the same time.

The filter mode (by tags) in the GM album and in the GM category supports only the PhotoCluster module.

[csilig]

Thanks Alex!

That was the reason why I purchased these stuff. But for some reason yesterday when I tried PhotoCluster the filter to use tags or categories were only appeared if I selected an album. Even I wanted to use tags or categories as thematic filters. I guess the issue was that I nested two galleries into each other and top one was intend to find only the special category related galleries and the lower one was querying in albums to find a special category assigned pics. Now I will try tonight the method what you have described. In any case I will let you know.

Thanks again!
Regards
László

[Alex]

1. The most difficult thing is to figure out how to create queues for the gallery – https://monosnap.com/file/GZqdzAkjiUnEYypfGD2rVDxTcnWcaN

2. Modules do not affect collections (albums, categories, tags) in the library. Modules are skins for displaying your media content on the site pages. You can display the same media content differently depending on what is more important at the moment.

[Alex]

In module names I use the word ‘album’ for easier perception, but these modules can show on the main scene both GM categories and GM tags

[csilig]

Thanks! I understand that, but I didn’t know how the queries are running when the AlbumsVies displays them. If the queries are already ran and results are stored in the database then the nested queries should work. But I suppose they are not stored in the database but running just at the time when the module starts to build the screen.

If I use categories what will happen with AlbumsView? I suppose It won’t distinguish and separate them like albims. That’s why I purchased PhotoCluster because I suspected that these module will show albums and categories next to each other and tags will appear below them! I was wrong with this idea?

Regards
László

[Alex]

1. You create a queue in which there are albums, categories and tags. After the module builds the main scene for this queue (displays the covers). Clicking on the cover creates a request in the database for the selected collection and the module displays items from this collection (category, album, tag).

But for PhotoCluster module you do not need to select tags in the gallery queue. You need select only the albums and module (themselves) will find the tags on each photo from the album and create Tags cloud (filter in the header) – https://monosnap.com/file/RSlcpO7MotJQCMy5GxERuvZJE1HAaG

2. AlbumsView categories, albums and tag in gallery queue https://monosnap.com/file/A0UD74OABcbSsHQ74DWdCr7eZTWDyQ

AlbumsView frontend – https://monosnap.com/file/1qeDdp3bprNVlZlM3f0REVoG2dVAOP

[csilig]

Thanks Alex, it’s perfect. Now I understand the logic. May I have another question? Is it possible to combine AlbumsView with AlbumStripe elements? Actually The cover part (main scene) of the AlbumsView is great and the thumbnail and the lightbox in the AlbumStripe is better, because it shows the main information about the pictures like map, exif etc. How is possible to make a combination?

By the way I forgotten to tell you that all your recommendation were perfect and it was a huge help!

Thanks a lot!
Best regards
László

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