Media Gallery v1.4.3a Released

I am pleased to announce 749, the latest release in the stable branch of Media Gallery. This release is designed to replace the previous v1.2.6 stable release. Media Gallery v1.4 has been in development for the past 5 months and has gone through 17 development release cycles to insure all features and functions work as they should.

Media Gallery v1.4 brings a large number of new features, increased stability, scalability and speed. Some of the new features include:

• Member Albums � the ability for you to give your site members their own album or albums to use.
• Interactive FTP Import, allowing you to select which media items to import and supporting automatic album creation based on sub-directory names.
• Redesigned and enhanced Administration features.
• RSS feeds
• Category and keyword support for media items.
• Integrated search capabilities, leveraging the categories and keywords to allow enhanced flexibility in searching.
• Image watermarking
• All configuration items are now maintained via the web interface, no more editing the config.php file.
• Electronic PostCard feature to allow your site visitors to send images from your albums.
• Added JUPLOAD (a Java applet) support for uploading media items.
• Enhanced the XP Publishing Wizard to allow album creation.
• Upload ZIP files of media items and Media Gallery will extract and import each item.
• Added support for using the external utility JHEAD to preserve EXIF meta data in your images.
• Added support for using the external utility JPEGTRANS to allow you to perform lossless rotation of images.
• Enhanced auto tag support by allowing you to specify the size of the thumbnail image and whether or not to use an image border.
• Added 3 new auto tags;
  • oimage � Allows you to have an original image in an article, this gives the flexibility of having larger images in your stories.
  • audio � allows you to embed an audio file in your stories.
  • video � allows you to embed a video file in your stories.
• Enhanced import from other gallery systems including Inmemoriam, Gallery v1, Gallery v2, Geekary and 4Images

Overall, Media Gallery still maintains the same clean user interface while adding several enhanced features and functions. This release has also focused on scalability and resource usage and it designed to be run in shared environment with emphasis placed on being very resource friendly.

With v1.4, there are also enhanced support features including a new Documentation Wiki which contains the latest documentation on using and administering Media Gallery. A full support site including support forums to help with any issues and two mailing lists for announcements and security issues so you are always informed immediately of any new developments or concerns.

Media Gallery has evolved into a mature gallery solution for any Geeklog installation. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I have enjoyed working on it.

Thanks!
Mark