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Well, bad news for me, but maybe good news for you.

The bad news is I didn’t made it into the GSoC; but the good news is that there is a proposal by other student that aims to implement photo albums into WordPress, so hopefully we’ll see this working in BuddyPress in the future.

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I hope I can do so

Thanks for your comments!

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Uhm… I think that if this project is accepted then you’ll see photo galleries in a couple of months for sure!

As long as it’s not already in development or if exists a working bp plugin, the project has a chance to be accepted… It’s a feature many of you are waiting. Having someone (me, in this case) doing this stuff allows people like Andy to focus on other important pieces of BuddyPress.

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@Gpo1: I’ll try to pull that in if possible

@Jeffca: Thank you!

I’ll comment if I have news about this.

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I submited my proposal. You can see it here:

http://gomobile.com.ar/gsoc-2009-application-photo-gallery-for-buddypress/

Once again, thanks to all who shared they thoughts. I’ll be happy to read your opinion about this!

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After thinking about this, I decided I’ll go for the photo gallery plugin.

I think galleries can be used in a lot of scenarios, and users will like to add and share their photos.

The features I have in mind now are:

• Photos organized in albums: This is important so your “birthday party” photos are separated from your “travel to Paris” photos.

  I thought a nice way to group photos (internally) is using “tags”, so if you want to put your photo in other album too you don’t have to upload it twice. At the same time, using this you could add photos to a “pool” (like in Flickr) easier.

• Photo captions + comments: Each photo may have a caption and friends can leave comments.
• AJAX navigation: to make it easier for users who want to see photo by photo.
• I’ll be happy to integrate galleries into groups. (so if your football team wants to share the shots of the last game, you can see them in the group’s album instead of in your “personal” albums)

You mentioned other ideas that I really liked, but I think this project is the better one. I’ll be glad to hear more feature suggestions and/or critics about features listed above.

I’ll send my application tomorrow (04/2) with -at least- this ideas, but if someone suggests something else for the plugin I’ll try to add it.

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I’ve been through the problem of having to configure each new blog in wpmu, and I found this plugin to be a bit helpful.

Interesting ideas. I haven’t thought about the possible educational uses BuddyPress may have and now you mention it, sounds good!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts

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@Jeffca: Thanks for your collaboration!

@Zenseeker: I think it’s possible to make a gallery with that feature as long as it doesn’t make trouble with future privacy settings! That’s a nice suggestion, thank you!

@Fishbowl81: Wow, that’s very interesting! Thanks for the information!

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BuddyPress is to build a social network! For a newspaper you can use a simple CMS.

That drupal module looks strong, it has a lot of interaction with Picasa! However, I think photo galleries in a social network are more like a way to share moments rather than a tool to showcase personal work or store/backup images.

Personally, when I use the photo galleries at Facebook with my friends is to share photos related to something specific (a party, meeting, birthday, old photos from school, etc). They have enough quality to be downloaded (but they won’t be useful if you want to work with them later).

Using a third party service like Picasa or Flickr makes your site depend on other site to work, and forces your users to open an account on any of those services (users don’t like registrations, and even sometimes they don’t know how to link one account with other). I know this won’t be an issue for the average person in this forum, but future potential users will have problems, and we have to think every single thing to be as fool-proof as possible.

If you are concerned about storage, maybe you can use a professional service then (like Amazon S3). But if it’s about privacy then it would be better if you don’t host photo galleries at all. Privacy is another thing that needs to be reviewed at BuddyPress!

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@21green: That idea sound nice, I\’ll consider it too.

@Jtbailey: The project sounds like a nice coding challenge, but I don\’t think it\’s relevant to the actual development of the BuddyPress \”core\”.

@Nicola: Don\’t worry, GSoC is every year and I think a developer like you won\’t have problems entering in the future!

What do you think about Photo Galleries?