Description

Gallery and Image Management

The Gallery Tool is designed to work in concert with the Resource Tool. This allows both instructors and students to create folders that represent "galleries" 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 folders", it's not clear that such is needed. An alternative approach would be to treat all such collections as potential galleries 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: singely, 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.

Viewing and Sequencing

The Gallery tool provides four main functions at this time:

1. Navigate to a gallery.
2. View the gallery as an array of thumbnails.
3. View an image full sized, perhaps in a pop-up window.
4. View the gallery 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 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/jpg, and image/png. Perhaps supported image types could be system configurable. A desire for other media types, including video has been expressed.

Gallery Tool Design

The application is considered to have three main states:

1. Collection navigation
2. Gallery View
3. Image View (and sequencing)

transitions are navigation or selection clicks: