Just took a look at the first stage of your gallery plugin and wanted to give you my personal feedback.

First of all it looks very good. Clean and simple, and already wrapped in a nice layout. Something that can’t be said about many other galleries out there, although I must say there are a few nice ones being developed right now. Shame you all do this hard work on your own :).

Here are my thoughts:
1. Personally I don’t mind uploading through http://ftp. I even see the advantage of being able to upload my own selfmade thumbnail images. Anyway it would be nice If I could overwrite a thumb if I would prefer a different one/different cut.

2. Option for rectangular thumbs. I don’t fancy the square ones because they take away the dynamics of the pictures. And I don’t own a Hasselblad You’re using tables to display the thumbs, so I myself would prefer centered vertical and horizontal thumbs. But perhaps this can be made into an option. Also what size the thumb should be (max-size).

3. The reason why until now I haven’t made my choice for a gallery system is that with each system you have to scroll to view the whole image. I would love to see the option of using a popupwindow for the larger image (I don’t need an ‘intermediate’ format). I’ve made a simple site for a friend which gives you an idea of how it could look with the popup (http://www.degroeneman.nl). And when using a single page for this, this page could be styled anyway you like (borders, backgroundcolors, margin and padding).

4. Perhaps a short title under the thumb and/or the larger picture. Ideal would be a title beneath the thumb and a description beneath the larger image, but looking at how hard I find it already to give my jpegs a proper name, this is not really a priority

5. I don’t really need comments. If people are going to like my images they can mail me. But I know lots of people want them really hard.

6. If you’re integrating the gallery into wordpress, then template tags like wp could be very handy. I’m thinking of a list of textlinks next to the gallery that link to all the main galleries directly, instead of having to move back to the main page with albumthumbs. Something like patgal_list_cats(); ?

7. Integration with wp could also mean a random/latest/favorite thumb on the weblog homepage with link to the album?

That’s it I think. I quess the popup and the centered thumbs are most important to me. The rest is OK.

I have a testblog running, so if you want I can be a ‘beta-tester’. Just let me know! I can ‘read’ php a little and done a bit of tweaking myself, but I’m not a programmer.

Jack