Hi

the answer is no

and the reasonning is mainly historical :
1st method appeared 10 years ago : FTP upload in "galleries" => physical
2nd method appeared after : Web upload, where each picture can be in multiple albums, thus storing them in album structure is a non-sense => virtual

sorry but this won't change

you still have tools like Batch Downloader to retrieve all photos of a particular album (go it flat mode to include subalbums as well)

Well Piwigo.com works pretty good so... you should go for a "one installation multiple piwigo galleries" setup instead of one install, one piwigo, multiple albums

mistic100 wrote:

You can't compare SmugMug to Piwigo ! it's absolutely not the same thing.

I know, but it would be nice if it were, isn't it ? ;-)

@flop25: I'll check your "multiple galleries"-option . I hope it's a bit documented. :-)

Hi Muug,

Considering your post on http://blog.dragonsoft.us/2014/07/08/ga … ment-21486 :

Muug on Serge D blog wrote:

So if you let your friends use your Piwigo to create their own albums all their pictures are put in one giant folder!?!?!? That really is a stupid idea. I mean, you can’t expect every computer user to be capable of doing ftp uploads!

I think it might be useful that I give more details.

Muug wrote:

[...] I - and the new users - don't want their pictures get thrown in one big gallery/melting pot. You want to keep those things separated. [...] can users create their own physical album folders, yes or no? And if not, I would be glad to know why not, so in a way I would like to know the reasoning behind this flaw.

Please don't say it's "stupid". There is a real human behind this decision. Actually that's me, and I find it a bit rude that you say I have "stupid" ideas ;-) This is not a "flaw" neither. This is a design choice. Maybe it's not the choice you would have made but there are good reasons for this choice.

There is not a single directory (big container) where all photos are mixed altogether. The path of every photo file on disk is upload/year/month/day/yearMonthDayHourMinuteSecond-random.jpg. So why don't we simply save the file as "galleries/Muug's album/Описание.jpg" ?

I remember I already gave a reply in 2009 [Forum, post 107756 by plg in topic 15172] Ignored sort order

plg in 2009 wrote:

There are several excellent reasons for this :-)

1. security, if your file is called 0123.jpg, whatever the permissions you set, anyone can directly browse to 0124.jpg and display your very private photo
2. simplicity, we don't care about forbidden characters in filesystem and http
3. concurrency, 2 admins can upload "my_sleeping_kitten.jpg" at the same time

I know that reason 1 could be solved with never using direct access to web server (and this can be done in 2014), but it was not possible at that time.

The original filename is kept in the database. You're not losing any data.

I think you're coming from Menalto Gallery and like most people who change from one tool to a new one, you want to find the exact same behavior. Please trust us, we try to avoid "stupid" design decisions. You should focus on user features (as long as you don't plan to contribute on improving Piwigo code) because that's what matters most for now :-) Piwigo is running like this for millions of photos and nearly nobody cares about the path on filesystem. Stay positive and happy!

Allow me to throw few curve balls :)

Let's start with the notion that it is good that there is understanding that people coming from different platform would ask questions and be "surprised" that new platform is not the same as one they are accustomed. And I would encourage both side of discussion parties be patient and try and see other side reasoning. Simply relying on the fact that "there was discussion 3 years ago" does not help as it is difficult to parse through gazillions of posts. However quick link back to that discussion is of great help. Thank you, Pierrick!

On the subject, FTP upload and/or physical folder "reconstruction" of albums has it advantages and disadvantages. But let's dive a bit deeper into "physical" aspect of the storage.
First of all, since all images are referenced via "_data" folder and not "gallery" current implementation of derived image info is perfect in my opinion and in fact it is similar to things "new" people are accustomed to. This is however derived data which while used

What is important to understand is that ability to maintain folder structure using web uploader in "gallery" folder is in fact important because IF one need to move things around or for any unfortunate reason DB is lost admin can reconstruct raw gallery structure by virtue of simply "syncing from FTP" and if images include EXIF metadata gallery would recover at least on image level.

When web uploaded images are all in one folder the only way out of such situation is to use approach common to Lightroom when virtual catalogs can be created based of EXIT metadata, i.e. gallery platform need to maintain keywords and/or tags, or some other data in pictures itself automatically. Please note that Lightroom does maintain physical folder structure and does not throw everything into one bucket.

I know there is a plugin which allows to do something in this area but I was not yet successful in setting it up. Perhaps having it as part of the core may help and ensure that PWG information is maintained in form which could be used later.

I understand there is no immediate desire to do any changes in this area, but getting better understanding of people's point of view may still be important.

BTW, I do not believe sites like SmugMug do not maintain some sort of file distribution model as it would be hard for any file system to maintain too many files in one folder unless we go toward something like Btrfs FS or DB-like storages where there is no physical files. I suspect this is what may be behind some of the systems like SmugMug.

unfortunate I do not think we would find middle ground here easily as this feature would not benefit Piwigo.com
personally, if FTP is still supported, there is no technical reason not to allow folder based file storage, but it all comes to "political" decision which is always personal stand.

To Pierrick, would using "Sites" effectively allow the same somehow? Let me elaborate...

"Sites" as they stand today are not really a sites in a sense how it is defined for let's say WordPress where each can have own theme, content, etc. It is more of implementation of the "server farm" model where physical storages are aggregated and shown as one space.

With that assumption, if I want to dedicate one site to specific user, giving him/her access to specific site location for upload?

a) can I do that?
b) would web uploader honor this association, i.e. recognize that all uploads from user A go to side A, and user B to site B? If not today, would you like to consider allowing it in one of next 2.7.x?

I think he is more talking about the "multi site" feature http://piwigo.org/doc/doku.php?id=user_ … tiple_site