Re: BP Album+ || New Features Requests and Discussion
@Gene53 – Facebook and Flickr require users to create an album before uploading, so we’re following that lead.
There are some compelling technical reasons for doing this.
First, if users didn’t have to group their media into albums, many of them wouldn’t. The result of this would effectively be like the user having one massive album with thousands of images. So when we went to the database to get that user’s images, the query would return like 2,500 images instead of 200 (which is the maximum number of images FaceBook lets a user have in one album). That would be a huge database hit, and slow down the site.
Second, to provide a quality user experience. It has been shown that people will eventually get tired of digging through an unorganized photo set and stop browsing pictures. To get a first-hand experience at this, go to a site like “istockphoto.com” and try to find a picture of a female model typing at a computer by typing in ONLY the search term “female”.
Generally, it’s a bad idea to force users to do things. But sometimes a gentle “5 seconds of work” push in the right direction greatly improves the community. That’s why the plugin is set up this way.
Also, if you’re running a “hobby site” where you’ve only got a couple of thousand members, future updates to the admin screen will let you disable albums entirely and dump all the media on a single page, much as version 0.1.7 does.
^F^
