MorfeoShow - how it works

1. Installation

You need to install the component and content plugin, both available on the download section of the Morfeo site.
There is also an install help page.

The plugin isn"t mentioned on the website help page, BTW, but it is there.

2. Create a menu item

As always, providing a link to your content is useful. Since I want to show my galleries within content, I created a test menu-item, called Morfeo. It doesn"t link to the component, however, but to a single article, with some lorum ipsum text. On this page, I will go and try to insert an album within the text, and display other albums in module positions.

Since an album overview can be handy, I created a separate menu for this test, called photogalleries, and my first item in this menu is the link to the Morfeoshow component. This menu will also be published on the Morfeo article page.

 3. Config of the component

The component is pretty straight forward. There"s a config section, where you can set some overall settings, apply your own css, configure the sizes of your gallery thumbs and image thumbs, etc.

The first thing that caught my attention in the config is that for using Flickr, an API-key is needed, whatever that is. A link to where you can get one is mentioned in the info, which is very nice. If you"re logged into Flickr, you can also directly go here.
Choose non-commercial, and I thought it to be confusing that it seems you"re applying for a key for development of an application, but you"re just going to use it for an existing one. Well. I applied for a key, got one and copied and pasted it into the Morfeoshow config.
Also filled in my flickr userid. To find your flickr userid, you can go here. (link also provided in Morfeoshow config). Alert: you can also find your album ID"s on this page! We will need those later.

Oh. If you have closed the API-key screen and want to look it up another day, in Flickr, you find it under the menu item You, Your apps.

I"ll leave all the other config alone for now, set to default. Let"s create some galleries and see how they look.

4. Creating galleries.


4.A Creating a Flickr single album.

On the Manage galleries page, select new. Choose a name for your gallery, select Single Flickr album and give it a short, and if needed a long description. Next, click on the Flickr gallery tab on the right.

Here, you fill in the setID of your FLickr album. You can find this on the same page as where you could find your Flickr UserID.

Save your gallery. The most complicated part of this is actually finding your API-key, your UserID and the album/set ID"s on Flickr.

The Flickr album shows up on my Morfeo album menu-item. No problem at all. 
The only thing it doesn"t show, is the single image descriptions I added into Flickr to several images.

Inserting the album on the article page is no problem either. On the morfeoshow gallery page, you can find the morfeo plugin code. My album id was 2, so in my article content, I just wrote {morfeo 2} and tada. Works like a charm.

Note: the album"s short description is displayed on the album overview page (so where you link to the morfeoshow component). The album long description is displayed under the thumbs after clicking on that album. With the content plugin, only the thumbs are inserted into the article, no album desription is being displayed.

I also created another album with the same set of pictures, but this time, I chose the gallery type Flickr Flash Gallery. This gives a flash slideshow of the images from the Flickr photoset.

4.B. Creating a Picasa single album.

Select another new album. This time, choose type Picasa Single album. Fill in the short and long description and click the Picasa tab for the settings.

Here you fill in your picasa userid. This is usually the prefix of your gmail account. Also, you need to fill in the album ID of the picasa album you want to show. This is again the trickiest part. Open your album in picasa and click on the RSS link to the album. The albumID will show up in the URL on the next page that will appear. If you need more help you can find it here.

Once you have that, Morfeoshow works just like with the Flickr albums. You can see your album on the morfeo component overview page, or insert a link with the plugin within your article.

Picasa shows the pictures in a slideshow. The visitor can control the slideshow and reveal image descriptions, if needed.

4.C Creating an onsite album.

Select another new album. This time, we choose one of the regular album types, let"s use Flash Imagerotator. Again, fill in the details, and change the size settings on the corresponding tab on the right and save your album.

Now we want to use FTP to add images. According to the info on the Morfeoshow website, you can upload pictures to this directory: components/com_morfeoshow/MYPHOTO.

So I uploaded a couple of images into this directory through FTP.

Next, click on the upload images button next to your gallery on the gallery overview screen in the backend. It opens in Single upload view, but you can click Add mulptiple images at the bottom.
And voila, it shows the uploaded pictures.

So right now it is time to realize that the images appear here, with just the file-name. So uploading through ftp is best done in album groups. Otherwise you might lose track on which image belongs in which album. Unless you have your images sorted out and given them reasonable filenames :-)

So far so good. I selected the images and added them. Then, the screen went white for an awfully long time. Well. I assume that is what you get for uploading images of over 1Mb each.
So tried again, this time with resized images, to 640x420, under 200Kb each, and this time, adding them all at once worked perfectly fine.

Now if you want to create another album with the same pictures, but then not a slideshow, but f.i. a classic shadowbox gallery, you have to upload the same images again. The images are moved from the ftp upload directory and added to the album itself. So, unfortunately, I haven"t found a way to make re-use of the same images possible here. You have to upload them again.

5. Display gallery in module position.

Here"s a challenge. Morfeoshow doesn"t provide modules. I found a couple of modules with Bulletproof Templates on the net, though, and tried them. Their names are modMFSlideshow and Mod SimpleViewer.

The annoying thing about these modules is, that you have to go into the media manager, into the morfeoshow directory and copy the name of the gallery folder you want to display images of within the module. Then you need to paste that name into the module. It doesn"t work with the gallery ID, which would be much easier. And, it also only works with onsite galleries, picasa and flickr albums you"ve created with Morfeoshow, cannot be displayed with these modules. 

Now there"s always tricks :-) Of course, you can make a menu item to a picasa album from within morfeoshow, publish this on a dummy menu and then find a way to load an article in a custom module. I"m sure you can get it to work that way, but if it is preferable?

Another way is simply copy/paste the include code both Flickr and Picasa offer and place that into a custom module. That would be easier, I guess.

Conclusion:

Nice component, with nice styles of galleries. It"s possible to import both Flickr and Picasa albums. Albums can be shown in articles. Lacks the possibility to load into module positions.

Of course, I already knew MorfeoShow. It is used on a couple of sites I built:

On the website of Mavemat Verhuur BV, for both Project pictures and pictures of building stages for big events;
On the website of SC Antilope, where it just serves as a loader of Picasa albums;
The same on the website of De Gouwe Streek


Onto the next... (ARI sexy lightbox)