Media Gallery supports a full RSS feed which will include all albums and also a per-album RSS feed which can be turned on / off in the Album Attribute Editor.
Media Gallery supports sending Electronic Postcards for any of the images in your albums. This feature can be turned on / off in the Album Attribute Editor. You can also specify if this feature should be available to all users (even those not logged-in) or only logged-in users.
If you have the CAPTCHA v3 plugin installed, you can also enable a CAPTCHA entry field when sending electronic postcards. This is just another security feature to ensure that the electronic postcard feature is not abused by spammers.
Media Gallery supports a moderation feature which allows users to upload media items to albums with member upload permissions. The media items are placed in a moderation queue until a moderator approves or deletes them.
Moderation is configured on an album by album basis. Each album can have a different set of moderators if you choose. Moderators are determined by glFusion groups.
For example, you could create a glFusion group called “Youth Album Moderators”. For a set of albums, you could turn on moderation and select the “Youth Album Moderators” as the moderator group. When a user uploads a media item to any of these albums, all the members of the “Youth Album Moderators” group will receive an email notification that a new media items is awaiting moderation (if configured, email notification can be turned off in the Album Attributes). Only the members of the “Youth Album Moderators” group can approve the media items. The exception is that the Mediagallery Admin group can also approve them as well.
When a moderator logs into the system, for the albums they moderate, there will be an option on the Administration Drop down menu called Media Queue, showing the number of items in the queue. The moderator will enter the Media Queue and either approve or delete the media items.
Media Gallery supports the ability for your users to print the images in your albums directly through an online service at DigiBug.com. Integrated online printing can be turned off or on per album.
Digibug.com has an affiliate program, of which Media Gallery is a participant, where the online printing service is offered through Media Gallery, and I, the author of Media Gallery, will receive a dividend for each image printed through the service. I have no plans to be able to retire on these dividends; they run a few pennies per image, so I do not expect to get rich quick. But, it is a quality service and I welcome the opportunity to offer it through Media Gallery. I hope you will allow your users to use the feature and all dividends will help fund the future development of Media Gallery.
Media Gallery is fully integrated with the services offered through Digibug.com and it all appears very seamless to your web site users. If they wish to print an image, they will simply click on the DigiBug icon on the lower right corner of the image display. This will take them to the Digibug.com web site with the image pre-loaded in their cart. They can choose from a whole list of image sizes and other items such as coffee mugs, t-shirts, etc. that the image can be printed on. They also have the ability to 'Continue Browsing' which will take them right back to Media Gallery where they left off.
Digibug supports many locations around the globe. You can refer to the DigiBug website for more details.
One of Media Gallery's goals is to be a very resource friendly application, specifically designed to run in a shared hosting environment. To accomplish this goal, many batch processes such as FTP Imports, Watermarking or resizing images is done using the Batch Processing System.
The Batch Processing System takes large batch operations and instead of performing them in one large run, breaks them up into several smaller runs called cycles. For example, if you are going to watermark 100 images, Media Gallery will create a batch session and watermark the images in several cycles. This approach solves several problems when running in a shared hosting environment.
First, most hosting providers have a maximum amount of time a script can run, if you exceed that time, the script simply stops. By processing large operations in smaller chunks, the server will never timeout. Second, processing image files is a very resource intensive process, generally taking a large amount of the CPU processor. Again, in a shared hosting environment, many hosting providers have limits on how much CPU a script can use in a specific time frame. To keep you out of trouble with your hosting provider, Media Gallery's batch processing system will ensure that it does not take too many CPU resources.
One drawback to Media Gallery's batch processing is that if you are only processing 1 or 2 items, it may seem like overkill.
Media Gallery allows your site users to specify some preferences in their viewing habits. Media Gallery will place a menu option under the My Account block menu labeled MG User Options. Registered site users will have the ability to configure the following items:
Site Administrators can disable this ability or can turn off the ability to configure any of the above items. In the Media Gallery Administration Screen, select System Options and configure which items a user can configure in the User Preference Overrides section.