BuddyPress.org

@Andy Peatling – Thanks for joining the discussion!

Here’s our feedback on your requests:

1) – Allow the creation of albums, add/move/delete photos in albums and albums themselves.

Most of this functionality will be included in the 0.1.7 Monday release. The only feature that may or may not be in this release is to re-order images within an album.

An important thing to understand is that our data model is fully tag-based. So in the database, both images and albums are essentially the same data type. To assign an image to an album we just add a tag to the image, and to create a new album we just say to the database “find me all the images with @tag”. This allows a single image file instance to be shared amongst thousands of albums if desired, saving tremendous amounts of disk space.

2) – Allow commenting on photos or albums (use the activity stream commenting system so it ties back to the stream and visa-versa).

We currently have this functionality working 100% in the current release.

3) – Add single photo uploads to the activity stream. If a batch has been uploaded or a new album created, show a gallery of thumbnails on one activity stream entry.

Single photo to activity stream works 100% in current release. Album post to activity stream will show the album’s lead photo. We cannot post multiple thumbs to the activity stream because BP’s activity stream format only supports a single image attachment, and we think generating a composite JPG or PNG of multiple uploads would seem strange to users.

4) – Add meta data to an image – title, description, date, geo? – perhaps just read the exif data too.

Meta data is added to the image using “System Tags” as described in our 0.1.7 features update. This means that not only does the image object contain all the standard data, template and plugin developers can add any other fields they want.

The function in pseudocode (not final version, we are still deciding on syntax) works like this: bp_album_add_system_tag(‘image_id’, ‘tag_name’, ‘tag_value’);

And then to read it back: $string_variable = bp_album_get_system_tag(‘image_id’, ‘EXIF_shutter_speed’);

*I will add EXIF data capability today, as two core developers have now requested it*

5) – Upload one or multiple images in one go.

We will try this out using the built-in WP flash uploader, but solving this problem properly for “photo sharing” communities is going to require considerable coding muscle. We need a “fault tolerant” uploader that can handle all sorts of network problems and ideally resize images on the *user’s* computer *before* sending them to the site.

6) – Tag members in a photo – add a “tagged in” sub tab to the albums tab that lists all the photos the user has been tagged in.

The function in pseudocode (not final version, we are still deciding on syntax) works like this:

bp_album_get_user_tagged(‘user_name’, ‘order_by’, ‘number_to_return’)

while (has tagged photos, the photo)

paginator, photo object data

(end loop)

7) – Allow photo attachments on activity stream posts – extend the activity stream posting interface.

This is the only one we don’t know how to do yet…

Thanks again Andy for giving your feedback on the plugin!

^F^