I've been a long time Flickr user and currently use a custom Ruby on Rails application that integrates with Flickr on my site. Of late due to a variety of reasons I have been looking to move to a simpler solution for an image gallery. Zenphoto seemed to fit the bill. I've been playing around with ZenPhoto these past few months on a local installation and I must say it meets most of my needs. However (in spite of all my tinkering) I haven't been able to figure out one thing.
In flickr (as well as pixelpost) one can navigate through photos in the order they were uploaded in one continuous stream (irrespective of the album they were uploaded in). Haven't been able to figure out how to do this in ZenPhoto in some easy manner. Any ideas ?

Well Pixelpost is a photoblog software that has all images within one folder physically. Zenphoto is a gallery software that sorts images in different folders.

You can of course use just one album then. Or alterativly store images in different albums and use a dynamic album. It would be doable but you would have to create a custom theme with custom functionality and would need some coding experience for that.

Not quite the same as the Pixelpost way would be to use the Zenpage plugin and the CombiNews feature. This mixes for example latest images within the news section but only in the news articles loop not in single view.

Thanks for the quick reply. I think to do what you are suggesting would be pretty complicated. I would have thought providing something in the API would be simpler since I believe ZenPhoto saves the uploaded date-time stamp for each image in the database. In fact I posted this to find out if there was some API feature I had overlooked.
I guess I'll have to code some custom functions in my theme to achieve this. Still if anyone knows of any workarounds do let me know.

It is doable but Zenphoto is just not structured that way by default as it follows the principle top level albums -> albums > images. Although within an album you basically have what you want so using one album is probably the starting point. Also the image_album_statistics plugin might be of help in getting the latest image.

Also I recommend to look at our php class methods. Those should provide everything you need for your custom functions as the standard template functions are more or less limited to the standard way. Perhaps it will be of help to get familiar with the standard theme by reading our theming tutorial first.

so far following the theming tutorial I have been able to achieve pretty much everything that I wanted to do except this. As a compromise (for now) on the home page I display the latest image got using the image_album_statistics plugin.
I understand that ZenPhoto is structured as albums -> albums > images, which is absolutely fine. I just wish that there was an alternative to the album -> albums > images navigation scheme to maybe navigating by order of upload (most recent upload up front). As you pointed out, achieving what I want is doable within the existing zenPhoto framework -- just that I will have to jump through some minor hoops to get there.
In spite of this, ZenPhoto has been very easy to customize to do what I want and I think this a great application you got there. Keep up the good work

All right, let us know when you finished your site and maybe post it on the showcase thread.

The alternative is the search mode. You could create a search based on the id field and exclude albums. This would give you the images in the order of upload.

I just managed to code the photostream feature I wanted for my theme today. Thanks a lot for the help guys, your thoughts definitely helped push me in the right direction.