Hi! I have been looking all over the place to find a good Image gallery extension in Joomla that allows to me displays many different albums in a nice and friendly way.
Nothing fancy really, I just need the Gallery or album list view with a thumbnail to represent that album/category together with a short description of the image category and maybe the number of pictures in each category, a Category or Album view where there would be thumbnails of all the pictures in a given category/album and finally a detailed view, which hopefully should be customizable so as to offer different options.
The type of display I'm most interested in for the detailed view is a popup window displayed inside the current window, showing my image clear and large, fitted to my browser window dimensions so as to take advantage of all the screen real estate and with a few buttons to move forward and backward between the images and hopefully the possibility to have a slideshow feature within the popup.
Another feature which is somewhat optional but very well appreciated too is the ability to post comments about the categories and/or the images, directly from within the popup view or within the category/album view, using Jcomments or Facebook comments for instance.
Well… I must say that Ignite Gallery does pretty much all of that and in a pretty nice way… but not nice enough for me!
The part I don't like much is the popup view. The main problem comes from the size of images: it is fixed for most views, which means it could appear nice or not depending on what the final user screen resolution and browser window space he is using and that means that I need to struggle and test lots of different options to find something I more or less like. That's not very good to me! I would rather want to know how it will look beforehand than putting a fixed size which would look different from one screen to the next and never be sure of how the final users see the images.
WORSE than that with some image size settings and under some screen resolutions I can't even see the buttons to move from one image to the next! Indeed with some viewer the buttons are below the images and when I scroll my mouse it scrolls what's underneath the image (meaning the page with the thumbnails) but not the image itself, which means I CAN'T ACCESS THE CONTROL BUTTONS!!
It seems much better to me to have part of the image active so that If I click to the right of the image it goes to the next image and if I click to the left it goes to the previous one. This is typically what Slimbox does. But the problem with slimbox is that there is no slideshow support, nor embedded comments in Slimbox popup view and that image size is fixed!
In the end the look and feel I would like to see is the one used by the Sigplus extension, which in terms of popup displays exactly the images as I like to see them, meaning fitted to the window, with all controls nice and clear and always accessible, independent of what resolution my images were in. The problem with that extension is that there is no comment support and above all no category management, which is something I need.
All that to say that in the end I preferred to use Phoca Gallery, which has its limitations too and in particular with regards to the popup view too, but it's also quite close to what I want and it's free…
I'd be ready to pay a (small) fee for the perfect (for me) image gallery but although pretty close, I feel that Ignite is not there yet (again, for me). But anyway I believe it's a quite good extension so keep it up and hopefully one day I'll see that perfect extension I'm dreaming of! ;-)
Don't hesitate to write back, should you want more details on something I said, I'd be more than happy to assist.
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