Serendipity Forums

Hi,

I am trying to use the built-in "Media" functionality to embed pictures in my s9y blog. I already have quite some directories with pictures on my server and tried adding the parent directory of this set of dirs as a Media dir. This caused a total lockup of s9y (I could only fix it by going directly to the admin URL and removing the Media dir I just added). Does anyone know of a better way to load such a directory? I want to be able to use the Media function (instead of the Markup: Gallery2 tags plugin which requires me to spell out the name and location of the file ... this needs to be usable by a total non-techie so I want to be able to browse visually for the right picture to include). Any advise?

Thanks!

Philip

You could try:

a) using ftp to upload your images to the /uploads/ folder.....
Make sure you enable the general option "Enable on-the-fly media synchronization" under Configuration -> Image Conversion Settings. If you want folders under /uploads/, use the media manager to create them... I don't think the media manager will see directories created via ftp, but it will see the images placed into those folders if the folder was created using the media manager.

b) specifying your existing media folder as the upload path
Configuration -> Paths

Thanks for the tips Don. Here's some more info on what I am trying to do. I have a Gallery2 install which I embedded into s9y. No issues there (apart from some style sheet issues which I haven't even started looking into). This G2 has 200 subdirs and 13k pictures (probably too much for Media to handle). I tried:
1. Putting a link in the uploads/ dir to point to my G2 albums/ directory. Crashes s9y due to the large amount of pictures
2. Putting a link in the uploads/ dir to a specific album in my G2. Works after a lot of thinking, but cannot open the images (probably because the image is itself not in my web tree and hence cannot directly be accessed by the browser)

I then realized there are some more drawbacks. First, the Media functionality by default shows all pictures in all dirs, which would in my case be 13k pictures. That's probably the next hurdle I'd face once I get over the amount of time it takes s9y in attempt 1 above to incorporate all those pictures. Second, I use Replica in G2 to create a folder with "blog worthy" pictures, but replica does not create a file on the filesystem (its all in G2's database). Hence my attempt does not work.

Unless someone has another way of dealing with this problem (apart from copying images manually on the file-system, or asking the users to find the url to the picture in G2 and then use the "upload from URL" feature in the Media library) I will start using [GImage] as this seems to be about the best there is ( with as major drawbacks: the fact that the user needs to learn the [GImage] syntax (for which I somehow cannot find a howto) and that the user needs to go into G2, find the right picture, remember album path and picture name, and then use it in the blog). Ah well .....

Philip

You're going much further with images/galleries than I ever have, so I really cannot provide much more input. You don't have to insert images into your posts from the media library at all - it can instead be a link to the image which is hosted elsewhere.

Quick addition: I have settled for using the "hotlink to server" option - this way I can tell people to get the URL to a picture on Gallery and then add that URL, and embed pictures using the Media button as a link through. Now I need to add a HowTo somewhere so everyone on my blog understands

Don, yes, but then I have to teach people how to write a link in HTML ... I'd rather keep using the frontend Now all I need is something in the editor that collapses the huge tag that the media button generates ... perhaps an idea for a plugin ?

Flip wrote:Now all I need is something in the editor that collapses the huge tag that the media button generates ... perhaps an idea for a plugin ?

I think you mean the markup around the image? This is implemented on purpose back in the days, CSS was not fully supported by all browsers.

Today it is not necessary anymore, and yellowed is working on this issue. I think the problem is compatibility with existing installations.