Feature Request: Ability to preview the contents of a gallery as images in a post or description
Problem (use case): Philomena displays images in sort order. Some artists and uploaders (henceforth: creators) upload sequential art. For example: ongoing comics. Artists often wish to provide an easy index to the story, or to provide links to the individual pages in the correct order. One workaround is to manually link pages in descriptions. This works well, but is inelegant and prone to failure if individual pages are replaced with new versions.
The most proper solution is most likely a way to ‘thread’ uploads. However, this may take a while to implement.
Instead, could Galleries be leveraged to achieve a similar result?
Proposed Fix:
- Permit previews of galleries to be shown in posts as ‘small’ thumbnails with links to the image.
- To prevent scaling issues of very large galleries, show only a preview of a few images along with the gallery title as a link. Allow the creator to indicate which images should be shown in the preview. Example choices:
• First (oldest) N images.
• Latest (newest) N images.
• Previous and Next images with the currently displayed image in the middle.
Proposed syntax:
- 
• GalleryIndex = Indicates this is a gallery index.
• gallery_name (string) = Name to display in link
• gallery_id (string) = unique identifier of a gallery on the site.
• display: = The type of display for gallery.
• display_type (enum) = first
| last
| centered
• first
= Displays first (oldest) N images in the gallery
• last
= Displays last (newest) N images in the gallery
• centered
= Displays 3 images in a table with the image_id of the current image ‘in the center’.
• count: (integer, optional) = Number of images to display. Not used when display_type is centered
.
Use Case: If an upload is a part of a set - for example a page in a comic - this would allow artists/uploaders to upload a single boilerplate in the description that will show the correct sequence of the pages. The artist/uploader would then be able to add new images to the links for the series by adding new uploads to the gallery, and arranging them appropriately within the gallery.
Example of ‘First’ with 3 images:
Syntax: 
Result:
Example of ‘Last’ with 5 images:
Syntax: 
Result:
Example of ‘Centered’, using 3453704 as the ‘center’, or image_ID the description is on:
Syntax: 
Result:
<- next |
you are here |
previous -> |
|
|
|
With this, assuming they used the ‘centered’ format, creators could add each new upload to the gallery used in the links, add the gallery link to their descriptions, and then each image would have ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links and previews.
When they add new images, the links in the description would automagically update, and if they want to they can simply rearrange the sequence using the ‘rearrange’ feature of the gallery.
Although development would absolutely be required, I think this might help with some of the problems I’ve seen creators have threading their comics or other forms of sequential art together.