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The Gallery Tool is designed to work in concert with the Resource Tool. This allows both instructors and students to create folders that represent "galleriescollections" of images to be viewed using the Gallery Tool. While collections defined by the Content Hosting Service (CHS) could be tagged in some way as "gallery collection folders", it's not clear that such is needed. An alternative approach would be to treat all such collections as potential galleries image collecitons and handle the case where there are no images present, perhaps with an error message. As such, filtering of non-gallery collections could be avoided.
The Resource Tool provides several means to upload images into a collection: singelysinglely, multiply, zipped, and via WebDAV. Once in place, access permissions can be specified, release and retraction dates defined, and order imposed. Note that some of these operations are not enabled by default in the Sakai 2.3 release.
Definition of Terms
Image
A resource who's content type is a member of the list defined by the Gallery Tool, usually one of the image MIME types such as image/jpeg, image/tiff, image/png, etc.
Image Collection
A resource collection who's members are all images. Image Collections have a property that defines the representative image to be display when showing the collection as an entity.
Gallery
A set of image collections group into a resource collection. Initially, there will only be one of these either hard-named to "Galleries" or identified by the user.
Use Cases
Instructors
- Create collection
- Organize images within a collection
- Organize collections (within the gallery) by subject, class session, ?????
- Assign students a collection for review (for an exam for instance)
- Assign students an image for review
- Assign students a certain group of images (may come from a variety of collections) for review (all images of Frank Lloyd Wright's early work from the semester for instance)
- See what students see
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The Gallery tool provides five main functions at this time:
- Navigate to a galleryan image-collection.
- View and edit metadata associated with a galleryan image-collection.
- View the gallery image-collection as an array of thumbnails.
- View an image full sized, perhaps in a pop-up window.
- View the gallery image-collection sequentially, perhaps in a pop-up window.
When an image is displayed full size, it should include it's name and description text (if any). It may be possible, when a single image is select for display, to jump into the seuqence sequence for that image. That would allow the user to then move back and forth in the sequence and see near by images (etc).
Images are defined to be of a certain mime type. At this time, these types are restricted to image/gif, image/jpgjepg, and image/png. Perhaps supported image types could be system configurable. A desire for other media types, including video has been expressed.
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The application is considered to have four main states:
- Navigation
- Gallery Collection Metadata
- Gallery Collection Thumbnails
- Image View (and sequencing)
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The GalleryService provides management of galleries:
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- Get the list of image-collections in the gallery.
- Find an image-collection by id
- Find a gallery image-collection by reference
- Get a list of galleries in a collectionGet gallery image-collection information
- Set gallery image-collection information
Creation of and editing of galleries image-collections is deferred.
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ImageCollection
The Gallery ImageCollection object represents an ordered set of images, mapped onto a ContentHosting collection. It must provide the following capabilities:
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