Photo gallery launch

Kirkburn March 25, 2010

Good morning!

As part of our commitment to making wikis easier to use, we're introducing a new way to add photos to your wiki, Photo Galleries.

What are photo galleries?Edit

Photo galleries allow you to collect and display multiple images together anywhere on a page. You can add captions, define destination links and adjust the sizes to fit any page type.

Photo galleries have existed on Wikia for a while, but we have now created a wizard to allow you to quickly create them from the editor without knowing any advanced wiki code. However, we have made some improvements to how they work.

How to create a gallery?Edit

Add a new gallery - there is a new toolbar button in the "Insert" section: - click this to add a new gallery! From here, you can go through the steps on the wizard to upload or choose existing photos on the wiki, add captions, create links to articles, and chose the size.

Edit an existing gallery - when viewing an article you can click the "add to existing gallery" which will take you into the wizard.

Advanced users, take note!Edit

Experienced users will likely notice these updates:

Photos in a gallery can now link to specific pages - for example, a picture of Kermit could link to his article page. This works in a similar fashion to standalone images.
When you click on photos that don't link to a specific page, you are given a lightbox popup instead of being taken to the image details page. You can still reach that page by clicking the icon at the bottom right of the lightbox
Galleries now resize depending on the page layout (instead of having a fixed number of columns). You can still override this if needed using wikitext.
You can set the caption alignment for an entire gallery.
Photo sizing has changed slightly - galleries previously had widths and heights options - we have simplified this to use widths for both directions.
The placeholder for a gallery in the rich text editor has been updated.

What's next?Edit

Looking to the future, we are planning on introducing slideshow functionality and videos. Your feedback is most welcome, and will help us decide how to further develop photo galleries.

Note: today's launch is for all English wikis - other languages will arrive when translation is completed.

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Retrieved from "http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Kirkburn/Photo_gallery_launch"

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Looks indeed very helpful

May 25, 2010 by Darth Stefan
New bug reports and suggestions should be directed to Special:Contact, thanks!

May 4, 2010 by Kirkburn
Pcj, thanks for the report: we'll get that fixed.
Coobra, we've got plans to do further work with photo galleries - we'll take a look into those too.

May 4, 2010 by Kirkburn
I might have a few suggestions for this feature... offer the ability to give a Destination filename - Sometimes people upload from unusually named files, but may not realize that's how its going to be named when they upload it.
Also, the option to choose a licensing from the pre-determined available ones.

May 1, 2010 by Coobra
Hey, looks like I wasn't logged in here. The above anonymous was me.

April 30, 2010 by Pcj
Kirkburn: At least on WoWWiki, the "editors" who use this inane "feature" add images sans the "File:" prefix. I am guessing this is deemed a "bonus" but the new gallery link doesn't show up on "what links here" on the image page. Meaning, given WoWWiki policy, the image quickly becomes a candidate for deletion. Adding the "File:" prefix corrects this.
I am not sure if this means it also shows up on Special:UnusedFiles (since that is cached and hard to test) but that may also be the case.

April 30, 2010 by A Wikia contributor
@Sulfur: fix should hopefully go live today.
@Gin-san: I'll look into those, thanks.

April 14, 2010 by Kirkburn
history
So, the bottom right icon is still missing... making the entire popup somewhat useless, since you can't actually get to the image unless you know exactly where to click.
When is that expected to be fixed?

April 11, 2010 by Sulfur
Refer to http://gintama.wikia.com/wiki/Trivia#Sadaharu_Bites.
Some queries:
1. how do I left-align the text to be in line with the image borders?
2. how do I get the red-links for images not yet uploaded to show up? They are now showing up as plain text
thanks

April 8, 2010 by Gin-san
history
@Kirkburn Only the image I linked. It was like that for days, but I assume something was changed on the back end to fix it, since it isn't doing it now.

April 7, 2010 by A Wikia contributor
Ability to centre a gallery: we'll look more into this. I believe the change in the gallery code so that it can resize to the page width makes this more difficult (both logically and physically).
@Teyandee: yup, we're looking at doing this.
@Alex7000: heights was removed so that the GUI would make sense (two min/max sliders together are inherently very complex, and hiding either one just makes it worse). However, we are hearing the calls to bring it back, and we hope to do so.
@Archduk3: I don't see that issue. There is an issue with the bottom right icon missing that will be fixed soon, but I don't see image repetition. Do you have a specific example I can look at?

April 7, 2010 by Kirkburn
In my opinion, popups are terrible no matter which skin I use, cause they often cause more clutter than it's worth. Got any JavaScript to nullify this one?

April 6, 2010 by RAN1
Would be nice if it would be added to translatewiki.net so it can be translated.

April 5, 2010 by MarkvA
Good feature! But is it possible to reduce a width of a "gray border" around the images?
See: http://kyattounindenteyandee.wikia.com/wiki/Testing

April 5, 2010 by Teyandee
history
Why can't I adjust the height variable. I used to be able to. I appreciate the idea of streamlining galleries; making them more accessible via point & click; WYSIWYG, etc. But not if it comes at the expense of customization. There are some gallery items on my Bionic Wiki that are wider than they are high. The new formula makes them look ridiculous. You guys are great; I love when you add new features - but don't take others away! Thanks for listening. :)

April 2, 2010 by Alex7000
You and me both.

April 1, 2010 by Tlosk
^ Not sure why I get logged out at Central when I stay logged in everywhere else, go figure. Anyways...
w:c:memory-alpha:File:Gallery image.jpg
Currently, smaller images repeat and the removal of the caption bar entirely removes the link to the file page, which is not a good thing.

April 1, 2010 by Archduk3
@888th Memory Alpha
@Tlosk I, and every one else at my wiki, would rather not have to add tags to every gallery we're using, since we had it set up before to auto center those things. Any attempt to center them using css is overridden.

April 1, 2010 by A Wikia contributor
Someone could please give me a link for translation of gallery stuff in italian version? Thanks!

April 1, 2010 by Gifh
Which wiki, Archduk?

March 31, 2010 by The 888th Avatar