The filebrowser was made with simplicity in mind. I've had a few people ask for things like the option of having a file associated with an image that would allow you to give each image a description. So, you'd put the description in the file, and the description would be pulled from the file and displayed on the page when that image is viewed. This custom name thing is pretty similar.
When it comes down to it, I didn't want to overcomplicate the filebrowser. Adding in the custom descriptions does just that. I'm of a mind that the thumbnailer takes care of this task because "a picture says a thousand words".
And when it comes to adding a whole new component just to give files a faux-name, isn't it the same amount of work to just go rename your files?
I'm not shooting down your idea, I'm just sharing my point of view. What do you think?
if it were just for my own personal use, of course, that would cool... and i love how it's so simple.... but if it's a gallery i guess it's designed for other people, who would probs rather see something like "Jim and Bob at Bar X" rather than jimandbob_at_bar_x.jpg (ie the extension isn't really relavent in this context)
I've actually been thinking about this request quite a bit. I was thinking that it might be cool to have a single file that sits in a directory and contains filename > file title declarations on a line-by-line basis. It would be easy to load that into an array and just check for filename rewrites on a file-by-file basis.
Or, as you say, just replace underscores and remove the file extension. It is worth noting, too, that the filebrowser doesn't require underscores in file names, so you could always name something like "jim and bob at bar x.jpg" and it would work just fine.
Mark, you mean like this: http://www.secondagenda.com/fileyard/ ? It's something I hacked together but it gets the job done. Not as glitzy as filebrowser, but images shouldn't be too difficult to pull off on your own. All the icons are base64 encoded into a single file, otherwise you can easily link to images from another file.
Would it be hard to do few options you could put on or off during the installation process. I guess that if you want to name your files yourself and have a description you'd have to use MySQL.
I'd love to name my files and give them description on my website, since even if picture says more than tousand words, little foreword can't hurt anything, they do it in books too ;)
:edit:
Oh, lech what filebrowser system is that secondagenda site using? I didn't see any name or anything there, or maybe I didn't look close enough.
I know that Filebrowser is meant to be very small and very easy, speed is the priority, but maybe god.. I mean Mark could add the extension option to FB like Vanilla has, and have an option for FB to use MySQL to store names and such.
I was thinking about this one last night in a drunken stupor. I think I've thought up a nice little way to accomplish this with very little headache.
By the way, I realize that a lot of people are put off by the fact that there are no templates in the filebrowser. First of all, like many people on the board have said, it's supposed to be small and easy to install. That is why I haven't added templates - because I don't want to add any more files to the thing.
Also, it's a pretty complicated set of rules that the thing runs through when building the file lists, and I've had to do it in a really wacky (some might say "retarded") way in order to make it speedy. One of my biggest beefs with tiny little apps like this is when they are slow. Why should a simple one-page php file be slow? I'm on a tangent now, so I'll shut up.
Yeah well, it's not the size of the program that is slowing it down, hell, PHPBB gets pages down like a cannon, it's mainly the workflow and how much stress it puts on to the database, and always size and speed doesn't go hand to hand. I appreciate that you want to make the FB small (needs a better name btw) but speed and useability are way more important to me, I can't have customers waiting for their browser to load a page that has half the options they waited for.
Not really, mine has lots of gifs and pngs, as well as jpegs. Any solution would need to work for any and all filetypes. FB itself works for anything, so naming things should work for anything as well.
Who the hell uses jpg's anymore? PNG is way better format, besides, when talking about program like FB we should always think about the whole demographic, all file formats, not just the ones that are popular. People will use this for more than just pictures.
Nice to hear that champ, I was just worried for a second there, it's just that I wouldn't use FB if it wasn't so great, and I don't want it to change too much without the possibility to optimize it with extensions and such.
Mark I've been thinking about this again - am using eSPG gallery at the moment with Wordpress and it stores all the image descriptions in a text file, is this the kinda thing you had in mind? Seems to work pretty well