Frequently Asked Questions

Why use minimal Galley rather than something else?

Before starting to write this script, I looked for quite a while to find the perfect photo gallery system. I was actually surpised not to find what I was looking for...

Here's what I wanted: something simple, light weight, and portable. I just wanted to upload my photos to my server via FTP and have everything else being taken care of automatically. I also wanted something with clean XHTML/CSS Standards compliant code output. Finally, I wanted something that looked good...

I personally think minimal Gallery does all that :)

How do I install minimal Gallery?

They're 4 basic steps to install minimal Gallery on your site:

  1. upload the mGallery folder wherever you want your gallery on your site
  2. rename the home folder to your liking and create additional folders inside mGallery (same level as home folder, not inside home folder) if you want additional categories
  3. upload your photos in each "category" folder
  4. Set permissions on "mGallery/_mg/thumbs/" to 777

That's it. After that you'll probably want to customize a few optional settings, and tweak one of the templates design. Check out the manual for more info on that.

How do I customize the look of minimal Gallery?

The template based modular architecture of minimal Gallery makes it highly customizable. The basic idea is to modify the look and feel by tweaking the HTML and/or CSS files while fine tuning the features and functionality by adding, removing, and changing default preferences of the PHP tags. All the tags and their different settings are thouroughly documented in the manual.

How do I add comments?

You can comment your files either by adding a text file with the same name (but a .txt extension) as your picture, or you can use the IPTC caption field. minimal Gallery <? current_file_caption() ?> tag will first look for a text file, then check if an IPTC caption is available.

How do I add user's comments?

One of the big features of minimal Gallery is that it doesn't use a database. In order to deal with user's comments efficiently, you'd definitely need a database. For this reason, and also the fact that I actually don't really like the idea of user's comments, this feature will most likely never be added to minimal Gallery. If this is a deal braker for you, I'd recommend using one of the many database driven photo gallery available out there. One of my favorite is pixelpost.

Is it possible to have subcategories?

I'm not planning on implementing this feature in the near future. Although if you want to have subcategories, it would be pretty easy to install several copies of minimal Gallery on your server and then creat a master index page linking to each one of them.

For some reason, some of the files/folders don't show up?

This is a weird bug that happened only on certain systems but not on mine so I could never reproduce it. I completely rewrote the file parsing engine though and as of v.0.8 it's fixed. Make sure to download the latest version.

Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in [...] on line 213?! Help!

This is most likely because you created category folders inside of the home folder. Instead, you should create category folders where the home folder is which is the "root" of mG (and where mG's index file is too). The home folder is one of your categories and you can rename it to what you want.

I updated and now my custom template's broken!

Sorry about that... But the back-end code was completely rewritten from v.0.7 to v.0.8 and I had to choose between better code or backward compatibility. Please, keep in mind that this is not a final release, so changes like that might happen again until I roll out v.1.0. After that, I will guaranty backward compatibility.

Why did you remove the a/v capabilities available in v.0.7?

Well, in short, almost no one used them, and it just seemed like a lot of extra work and code for nothing. I'm thinking about writting a mp3 version of minmal Gallery though, but first I gotta get this one to 1.0!

What features are you planning to add in future versions?

In the near future, I want to add archives and a search engine. I'm also thinking about a nice way to zoom in/out of full size photos, watermarking on images, URIs rewrite through mod_rewrite, and maybe (a big maybe) a simple admin panel to upload files from a web browser. Also, suggestions are always welcome...