Visible photo / collection counts for Album Sets?

SunFoxNC · 2016-09-08 02:35:14

How hard would it be to implement a visible indicator for album sets that could display either the number of photos or album sets contained by a given item in the grid?

I use the Iconic layout for the album sets in play on www.sunfox.com and there are times I think it'd be nice to warn the users when they're contemplating clicking on what may be a big gallery. I could manually do it in the text/caption but if the collection were to ever change in the future, I'd have to remember to fix the number in the caption.

I'd really love it if it were clever enough to figure out that if the cell represents an album set that it'd count the number of albums in that set and if the cell is an album, the number of photos in the album (perhaps with different styling so you'd know if you were looking at a photo count). Something like being able to configure three possible options for the album set to compute the counts to be displayed (number of collections only, number of photos only, or the combination I described above).

Thoughts?

Ben · 2016-09-08 13:57:34

It would add coding complexity and overhead to the backend, as the numbers of child albums, sets and photos would need to be calculated on-the-fly.

SunFoxNC · 2016-09-08 21:25:11

I took the liberty of peeking at the database after posting that thinking that the counts were captured in the tables but I didn't see any columns or views computing them.

The query to compute the counts would be simple enough but I can understand the performance hit not being worth the extra complexity.

Perhaps one day those counts (and other useful metadata about albums/sets) could be exposed as an API that we could get at using PHPlugins and use to render custom HTML. I seem to recall another question recently about the feasibility of caption information being used in the Photoswipe galleries...this might be another case where PHPlugins and an API might solve the problem. But I'd rank that relatively low on the list of things to do for Backlight...would be nice to be able to get at the metadata within the framework but getting the base functionality for the non-programmers is even more important.

I do appreciate you guys bearing with me as I have these wild inspirations...sometimes it's hard for me to remember that SQLite isn't MySQL or Oracle and that some of the nice shiny toys I have there aren't available in SQLite. What's really cool is how Backlight's framework now allows us to do or think about the possibilities of things we can do that I don't think CE4 would have been able to do given the restrictions of Lightroom's web module.

Ben · 2016-09-08 23:43:44

Yes, the query itself is simple enough. The codebase for Backlight and its extended components is a complex beast. It's a result of several years of iteration that has catered to forward and backward compatibility between major products. Any changes need to be reliably applied across a large customer base. So what may appear as simple isn't necessarily so.

SQLite is actually quite an impressive system. I long held reservations about performance and integrity, but it has held up exceptionally well. There are some features that I miss with the version of SQLite that ships with PHP, namely integrity constraints and cascading deletes, but I have no reservations about the performance or scalability. For the types of site that Backlight caters to, I wouldn't hesitate to use SQLite for anything I could do with MySQL

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 2016-09-08 02:35:14

Visible photo / collection counts for Album Sets?

#2 2016-09-08 13:57:34

Re: Visible photo / collection counts for Album Sets?

#3 2016-09-08 21:25:11

Re: Visible photo / collection counts for Album Sets?

#4 2016-09-08 23:43:44

Re: Visible photo / collection counts for Album Sets?

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