SPGM for Joomla!


SPGM is light-weight, fast, and stable. By today's standards it's "old-fashioned" - it doesn't use lightboxes or animation effects, although it does have a Javascript slide-show. It is not suited to modern websites that need to show off the latest technologies. Nevertheless it is light-weight, fast, and can be configured in many different styles. It still has its place.
Front-end features include:
* Supports jpg, png, and gif images
* Gallery/picture captioning including multi-language captioning
* Infinite sub-galleries
* Several sort options for both pictures and galleries
* Random or fixed thumbnails used for gallery previews
* Optional new pictures highlighting
* Can optionally show Exif data
* Slideshow mode
* Optional automatic drop-shadows around thumbnails and pictures
* Many options for controlling layout and behaviour, for example number of rows and columns, etc.
The back-end features multi-file uploads, resize on upload, automatic thumbnail generation, creation and renaming of galleries, caption editing, front-end configuration, etc.
There's a PDF user guide in case you get lost.
It's actually really easy to import pre-existing image folders into SPGM, but I guess the user guide was not clear enough. I have addressed this issue in the latest version of the user guide.
As it says in the description, SPGM is an "old-fashioned" gallery, and may not be to everyone's taste. It has excellent support for existing image folders, is lightweight, fast, and stable. I think it is worth keeping SPGM alive as it is good to have a choice, but I will be guided by the next few reviews.
My favourite aspect of the SPGM Gallery extension for Joomla 1.6 is the 'thumbnail generator'. I'm able to quickly upload images into the directory via FTP then login to the admin panel and selec 'generate thumbnails'. A very, very, very useful and time-saving option.
I would thoroughly recommend SPGM Gallery to anyone looking for a quick, reliable and dependable image gallery. It has accessible code and I'm surprised so much is offered under a non-commercial licence.
A great job to the whole team and thanks so much for all your hard work - it certainly shows!
I liked this gallery component most, because it is neatly done and very flexible. No flash, no overused lightboxes.
Small negative point is that is used tables so it limits styling possibilities a little.
Thank you for your effort!
I thought it would be an easy project, but wow, I was wrong. Finding the right gallery was frustrating. Some of them cropped the thumbs so only noses and teeth were showing. Some didn't allow captions. Some could only handle 20 photos at the most before they bogged down. Hours of work, installing many modules and plugins, and I had a really lousy photo gallery to show for it.
This morning I noticed SPGM and since it mentioned there were a lot of configuration options, AND it's lightweight (I tend to bog down my Joomla sites with too much heavy stuff), I decided to try again.
I was very delighted with the results! SPGM can handle a few photos or a lot of photos, gracefully. Uploads are incredily easy, you can see everything you're selecting. It's fast. Thumbnails are automatic. Lots of configuration options for captions and titles, rows and columns, thumb sizes and photo sizes and slideshow.
The spgm.conf parameters file is available in the back-end admin area of SPGM... look for the THUMB photo that's named spgm.conf (it's underneath the list of galleries.) This was the only odd thing I found about the program: the parameters file was hard to find and I almost missed it. I think it should be listed in the upper right with the other menu items, where parameters icon is usually found. So that's why I'm telling you where to find it.
Just click on the spgm.conf thumbnail and you'll find lots of options to tweak - and then save the file. Very easy! I had to play with the options a bit until I got the results I wanted on the front end.
I also adjusted the spgm.css file a little, and now everything looks great.
SPGM is very easy to work with, and provides an attractive gallery. I'm sure I will be using this very NICE gallery solution for many more projects.
Thanks for that and good suggestion re the spgm.conf file - that should quite easy so watch out for a new release in a few days.
- multi-languages
- bulk upload of pictures and descriptions (captions)
- sub-galleries structure
- customizable layout
- no browser-plugin required (flash & co)
- and a few more minor things.
Commercial or free, that wasn't the main point.
I've checked out quite a few solutions, but only SPGM gives me exactly what I need! So thanks a lot for your efforts! Donation will follow...
I have tried other galleries without success. I recommend this extension to everyone.
A great feature is the ability to FTP the photos to the server, it saves a lot of time and aggravation.
Support from the developer for this extension is second to none. I contacted him and his response was almost immediate.
Great documentation, thanks for the upgrade, it looks great!
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for your efforts.





