Hi Roger,
First, I would like to tell that GalleryServerPro (GSP?) is the first impressing Media Library project I've seen for a long time. Well, even better, I think it's the first versatile Media Library project at the time that seems well driven and provides a stable version with cool features.
So, thank you for leading such a great project, I'm sure it could become a leader in it's category. I've been thinking since a long time for such a project and I would like to develop one by myself, but I really miss some free time to do so and it would take a long time before I could reach the quality level you've already hit.
My opinion is that Gallery Server Pro looks very promising, but still lacks some important features. As I'm writing notes about that since few months but never had the time to start the project, I would be glad to share with you a bunch of ideas that could add value to GSP.
Here are some ideas (from my original project) to share and discuss, if you find some of them interesting feel free to contact me as I could send you some more details:
*The Media Library should support multiple Media Types (as GSP does already):
- Images
- Audio
- Video
- Documents
- Archives
- Applications
- Fonts
- ...
*Each "Media Type" should be related to a set of file extensions:
- Images (png, icon jpg, bmp, gif, psd, ...)
- Audio (mp3, wax, mid, wma, kar, ...)
- Video (avi, mpg, wmv, mov, rm, ...)
- Documents (chm, txt, doc, xls, html, pps, ppt, msg, mmpa, pdf, vsd, vcf, xml, rtf, swf, ...)
- Archives (rar, zip, ace, ...)
- Applications (bat, exe, msi, ...)
- Fonts (pfm, ttf, fon, ...)
This is important to let the user search by type of media and/or extensions.
*Each "Media Type" should have a list of categories. For example, the type "Images" should propose the following categories:
- Icons
- Photos
- Wallpapers
- Backgrounds
- Screenshots
- Animated (for animated Gifs).
- ...
Categories are important to define a base classification. Of course, the categories should be editable by the administrator.
The most important feature missing is (I think) the tagging support. Each Library item should support tags and then allow user to make searches based on tags (flexible and useful). I made some researches about Tagging support into Blog Frameworks (like Wordpress, ...) and there is some documentation on the Internet you could read to get inspired (they call that the Taxonomy tables).
The upload system should allow to define default tags to assign when uploading a set of files.
The Library should also be capable to detect files existing in dubble in the library. There shouldn't be twice the same item in different folders (to keep the library clean). Using tags and categories, a single item could be referenced under multiple keywords.
One last idea (more can be discussed) is that many times, we have similar files (e.g.: for images) that share many attributes (like having a set of icons from 16x16 to 256x256). Each item should be able to have "brother" items. This could be handled by assigning a "Collection" to the item. Furthermore, this would allow the collection to have a Licence (Free for use, Creative Commons, Shareware, ...) and an Editor (link to the source URL).
Well, I know many people around can have many features requests, and there is a lot more things to discuss that could be interesting to add to GSP but I wanted to put some ideas here on the forum.
Let me know your interest about adding these kinds of features to your software, or maybe if you plan to develop some "open" community to allow the users to develop new modules and add them to next releases.
Thank you for reading this !
Regards,
Mike.