A tumblr-like Gallery in Joomla?
I guess a lot of people have noticed the presentation of galleries on tumblr, the image blogging platform, and liked it. I certainly loved it so much that I looked back at the more traditional gallery I use, JoomGallery, and wished it were a little fancier in its presentation.
A little scouting expedition into the depth of the Internet showed that there were many, many extensions available for other platforms, but nothing for Joomla.
Then I stumbled upon a German component named Event Gallery. Apparently, a tech-savy photographer created it to showcase his assignments – considering the name of the component, he is probably an event photographer. The extension had the presentation I liked, but nothing else: the galleries were flat (mine are deeply nested); the focus was on selling images (mine on by-passing the forever despised Facebook), and I had already thousands of images in JoomGallery.
I found a neat little trick, though, that made my life a lot easier. I can get the tumblr look without having to manage all my images in EventGallery, which is pretty much what I wanted.
To make this work, you have to have both your gallery software (in my case, JoomGallery) and EventGallery.
- Choose the galleries you want to display in tumblr format.
- Find the location where the gallery stores the original images (in JoomGallery, that’s pictures/joomgallery/originals
- Go to the directory pictures/eventgallery
- Create symbolic links from the originals to the eventgallery and name them something you like (not what the gallery did)
example: ln -s ../joomgallery/people_3/marco_27 Marco - Go to the Event Gallery admin menu
- Click on “Sync Database (top right corner) and follow the instructions
- Create a menu item for the new gallery; choose Event Gallery – Event Image List as menu item type
Done!