It took me a bit of effort to get it installed because between beta 1 and beta 2, I reinstalled my laptop. Which meant that I’d none of the dependencies installed still. One thing I would suggest to the development team is a good set of installation instructions to help beta testers along. I did, of course, miss out on the beta upgrade option which would probably have seen me nicely on my way. Instead, though I was condemned to wrestle with Apache2 and, not normally having any contact with such things, I had to wait until Tony was around to debug my problem.

Anyway, all installed, I successfully uploaded my holiday pictures and, unlike in beta 1, I could actually view them:

As you can see in the screenshot above, when you hover over a photo, a small toolbar appears with commonly required actions on it (I think this toolbar is a fantastic idea). This was there in beta 1 but I think there are more options now. You can now:

• Edit this photo
• Rotate 90 degrees counter-clockwise (which is perfect because this is usually the first thing I need to do…)
• Rotate 90 degrees clockwise (…or this)
• Move this photo to another album
• Choose this photo as the album cover
• Additional options > Delete this photo (This one is a drop-down rather than just a button – does this mean that there are other ‘additional options’ to come? On the single-photo view pages, this option is just a wastebin button, which is easier if there are no other options to fit on.)

So, what else has changed…?

Well tagging seems to be much the same. As I replied to a comment on my previous post, you can only add tags (on the single-photo page or on the album page) or delete tags (Contents > Tags). It would be good if we could ‘manage’ tags by merging two tags or renaming tags. Renaming would be useful (saves you deleting and having to re-tag all those photos with a new tag). Merging maybe less so but if you’re talking huge numbers of photos and you find you’ve used inconsistent tag names, merging can be useful.

If you’re in the album view and you click the slideshow button (top-right), you get a rather slick-looking slideshow appearing…all Web2.0-y. If you’re in the single-photo view, the slideshow button doesn’t seem to work – it thinks there are no photos to show. I’d expect it to start a slideshow of the album to which the photo belongs, or the tag group..hmmm not sure which. Maybe you should be able to select from a drop-down menu button which…

One other thing about single-photo view: there’s a button that says ‘full size’ but I’m not convinced (though I’ve not checked) that it is actually full size that it displays at when you click it.

Other things that I played with:

• Dashboard lets you edit what widgets are displayed, portal-style. Either the wide version in the centre, or the narrow version on the right-hand side.
• Clicked Settings > Start translating and threw me back to album view and no obvious way to translate. I assume it’s not implemented yet.
• I like the hiding of the scary-looking settings in Settings > Advanced and the scary message. I’m not touchin’ nothin’!
• Content > Tags lets you manage tags – delete them only so far it seems.

And that’s it for now. I’ve just run out of time right now and wanted to post my feedback so far. In general – still looks great!

P.S. The permissions UI hasn’t been updated in beta 2 but a comment on my previous post asked what I thought of the proposed UI for the permissions (http://codex.gallery2.org/Gallery3:Permissions_UX). I think that looks way way better. I like the shortcut of just pressing preset buttons. That’s probably as much as I’ll ever need. You do get the nice shiny way to do advanced permissions if you so need it still so no one is left out.

Generally, all good.

Uploading images (first things first!)

After installation (which was a reasonably slick experience, although I was slightly confused by having to install apache2, php, and mysql first), Gallery neatly leads me through installing the first photos to my gallery. The browse dialog in which you select the photos you want to upload is slightly odd because as soon as you’ve selected the photos in the window, they start uploading. There is a ‘Done’ button but that seems to refer to having ‘done’ the upload, as opposed to having ‘done’ the selection of photos ready to upload – which is what I expected and was slightly surprised by the uploading starting before I expected it to. Wonder if this is intentional…cos it’s a little bit weird?

When the images have uploaded, they’re displayed in a tiled layout on the page (although, at the moment, the photos themselves don’t display – I guess that’s the joy of betas   ). The cool thing is that when you hover over a thumbnail, a small toolbar containing the most common tasks (edit, move to another album, set the photo as the highlight photo for the album, delete) appears over it. I did just try to take a screenshot but sadly I’ve forgotten my password so I can’t log back in…and the password reset function hasn’t been implemented yet…

Update: turns out I took some screenshots when I was playing:

Tags

Oo, can add tagz! (That *is* actually what I wrote in the notes I made.) You just enter a tag, one at a time, then press ‘enter’. Tags were the reason I was looking at Zen Photo when I became despairing of Gallery 2 (and wanted cool tags like I have in WordPress and Delicious, instead of just sorting by albums). It’s easy to manage the tags you’ve created from the menus (Admin > Content > Tags).

Album permissions

And then we get to album permissions. On Gallery 1, the permissions were slightly clunky but most could cope with them. On Gallery 2, the permissions were incomprehensible and when I googled for help I found other people who were similarly baffled and no actual answer to my problems. On Gallery 3, they’ve rightly got rid of the obviously UNIX-style permissions.

You can create different users and groups for your gallery. A reason for creating other users (who aren’t administrators) is so that you can section off albums so they can be selectively seen, for example, by family members, by friends, by work colleagues). When you create a user, you get the option to check the box ‘admin’ which presumably gives the user administrative access to the gallery. The users makes sense but I’m slightly confused as to the groups. I’ve nothing against the groups per se (I can see they might be useful for administrators of massive gallery sites) but I think groups should be an ‘advanced’ option that is not required for use by most people.

I can’t quite work out the ‘Registered Users’ group – it seems to get everything added to it apart from ‘guest’. I added TestGroup group and created two users (TestUser and test2) which I dragged and dropped to the TestGroup group. Worked nicely.

You set who can access each album by clicking Options > Permissions when that album is open, which opens the Edit Permissions dialog box. You then indicate the permissions that each group has on the current album. I like that you work by album but I’m not so sure about dealing with groups. I feel that it’s a bit of a ‘power user’ task to be working with groups – you have to have planned and organised your groups to be able to use this dialog effectively; it also adds a layer of complexity to understanding what permissions an individual user has.

Thinking of my friend who uses a gallery we host, she (and I) would find it a lot easier to work with the users themselves – maybe with a power user tab option to switch to working with groups. I’d much rather say that user ‘family’ can access this album, rather than set up a group called ‘family’ with a user called ‘family’ in it (there’d be little point, typically, to separate out different parts of the family to be multiple different users within the group). I agree that groups can be useful but I just don’t think they should be the default.

Slideshow

And finally, the slideshow facility (for viewers of your gallery rather than for you a gallery owner/administrator)  is provided by a third-party Gallery plug-in which is a little slow to load but you get the option to install a browser plug-in that gives you some client-side loveliness.

Overall impressions

Looking good.

Gallery 2 does many things for many people and this diversity has made it unhealthy. The code base is too complex and over-engineered because it was designed to fix every single thing that was wrong with Gallery 1 (Second System Effect) leaving its scope hazy and broad. And while the Gallery 2 code supports DB2, MSSQL, and Oracle we don’t actually have anyone on the team that knows much about them, so there is nobody to fix bugs or add features in these areas. Gallery 2 was designed from the bottom up with architecture and design patterns first, so the User Interface and User Experience need a ton of work! This is shown by the huge number of strings and documentation that need to be provided in the product for people to understand it, and multiple attempts for tech writers to document Gallery 2 have all failed. Lastly, the product is immensely complex which forces developers to take months or years to get up to speed. This makes it very hard to attract new developers, and that makes us sad.

(Gallery 3 Begins)

This paragraph, in its analysis of where they went wrong in their approach to designing Gallery 2, could easily be applied to numerous other pieces of software; it epitomises the approach taken by so many software developers (both Open Source and proprietary):

• Not clearly identifying who the software is for and what they want to be able to do with it. And not sticking with that definition, with the result that the software tries to become all things to all people and fails everyone by being too complex.
• Reacting to, and implementing, every user request indiscriminately. Yes, listen to users but do not be led by their requests. Users are not designers. They just want to do what they want to do and don’t really care what other users want to do. Some requests will conflict with other requests. Which is why you must have a clear understanding of who your users are, what their skills are, and what their goals in using your software are. Only then can you make informed decisions about which requests should be absorbed and which should be ignored. You can’t please everyone but, as long as you know who they are and you’re careful to design for them, you can please the people who you want to use the software.
• Making the software difficult to maintain and support. Aside from lacking contributors to the project, it increases the risk that when updates are released, they break other parts of the software because no one in the development team really understands how everything hangs together.
• Expecting documentation to paper the cracks in the software’s design. Documentation (not just the manuals but the labels on the User Interface or the titles in a wizard) has an important place within the whole product but always check honestly for whether the documentation is really necessary or whether it’s just covering up for a dodgy bit of design.
• Assuming that User Interface is the same as User Experience. The User Interface (UI) is only a part of the User Experience. One example in both Gallery 1 and 2 (though it’s way worse in Gallery 2), is the expectation that users implicitly understand Unix-style permissions. The UI didn’t help but the underlying concept of Unix-style permissions makes the software (and the UI) so much more complicated than it needs to be. (Gallery 2 was way worse because I still can’t work out how to set permissions – and I do, to an extent, understand Unix-style permissions.)

I think it’s really cool that Gallery have openly recognised and acknowledged the problems with Gallery 2 and what they need to do to make Gallery 3 successful. The really hard part now, though, is to make sure that the development team don’t fall back into their Gallery 2 ways of thinking. That’s not to disparage the development team; it’s just hard to adopt new approaches. But it will get easier with practice. The clearly stated Gallery 3 list of priorities is encouraging and, while I’ve not looked at their progress in the alpha yet, I look forward to the first release.