Now available: MoreGallery 1.3

Mark Hamstra | February 20, 2015

As of today, your favorite gallery - at least we hope it is your favorite - just got a whole lot more awesome. With MoreGallery 1.3 we're proud to introduce a bunch of great new features and improvements to make managing galleries even better. Among the 7 new features and 10 improvements are the ability to choose multiple image crops for responsive image support, automatically filling the image title with IPTC data from Photoshop and more flexible integrations thanks to 5 new plugin events.

Check the full changelog here, buy a MoreGallery license here for only €25, or keep reading and watch the video below to find out more about MoreGallery 1.3.

Image Crops

Quite possibly one of the most anticipated features in 1.3 is the ability to define your own image crops. Built with the awesome Jcrop library, it is now possible for the admin to configure any number of crops. The end-user is provided with an easy to use interface that allows them to select the crops from the source image - optionally with forced aspect ratios and sizes.

This new feature, among other things, enables you to take full advantage of the <picture> element, providing different crops for different screen sizes. 

Read more about Image Crops in MoreGallery in the documentation.

Hiding images

Sometimes you don't want to show an image in the gallery - yet. Or perhaps your Gallery is used as a container for background photos, and the photos are matched to the season. In these scenarios, the ability to quickly mark images as inactive and hiding them from the front-end without completely removing them, is exactly what you need. 

Improving Tags with Typeahead

Under the hood, all tags added to images were already stored centrally to allow smooth filtering and listing available tags. Now, with 1.3, you can take advantage of that with a silky smooth typeahead that will suggest any tag you may have used before. You will no longer have to remember the right spelling or case, as you can just choose from the list. 

Extracting IPTC data on upload

IPTC is a standard that allows embedding meta data in images. It is most commonly used by photographers, who add a title or caption to the file before sending the files off to their clients. 

With the 1.3 update for MoreGallery, it will read the file searching for this information. When found, it automatically sets the image title to what was stored in the file, so you don't have to type it again!

Improved thumbnail transparency

Previously, thumbnails of transparent images would end up with a black background. This was, truth be told, pretty ugly. With MoreGallery 1.3 thumbnails properly retain their transparent backgrounds or alpha channels, making them look better than ever. 

Automatic orientation detection

Took a photo while holding your phone sideways? MoreGallery now knows (thanks to embedded EXIF data), and will make sure the image is automatically rotated to the right orientation. No more flipped photos, or images that look like they fell over.

And more..

But that's not all! Further improvements in 1.3 include:

  • MoreGallery is now context-aware, meaning you can override any of the system settings with context settings! This is great when you have context-specific media sources or need different behaviour per context.
  • Snippet properties have been added to the package, so when using with the ContentBlocks snippet field or dragging the snippets into a template, you will see all the available properties in an easy to use list. They also have a proper description now, and system settings have also been properly named and given a description.
  • The mgGetImages and mgGetTags snippet have also learned a new trick with a shiny &where property. For advanced users looking to do additional filtering, this property accepts a JSON encoded xPDOCriteria condition that will be added to the database query. 
  • A loading spinner has been added to the image tags to indicate it is still fetching associated tags. Previously it was not clear they were still loading in the background, especially on slower devices or networks, causing confusion to the user. 
  • A bug that could result in tripping over mod_security when editing image data has been resolved.
  • New [[+width]] and [[+height]] placeholders are now available in the imageTpl chunk.
  • Improve the way EXIF data is loaded and stored to make it easier to access specific information, and less likely to break uploads too.

The complete changelog for this release and previous versions is available here. The update is available for all our licensed users at this very moment. With questions about this release, please do let us know via the comment section below, or contact [email protected]. We would be glad to help!