I like the look of Flash galleries. But I want my site to not be Flash so its searchable and linkable. I like the look of Lightbox and Slimbox (especially once you speed up the delays), but you can't easily link to a specific image in an album. What to do?

I toyed around with doing a Lightbox/Slimbox theme for ZenPhoto, but kept running into some issues. An important one for me was I wanted whatever JavaScript magic that was displaying the images to be able to handle a URL that could tell it to display a specific image -- I often want to email a link to a specific image.

Today I stumbled across Galleria -- a very cool JavaScript image display library. Check out the demo:
http://monc.se/galleria/demo/demo_01.htm#img/grass-blades.jpg

Nice, huh? Slick like Flash, but all JavaScript and CSS. So, after an little mucking about, I've got a ZP theme using Galleria.

This is very much not a finished work, but I thought I'd share it in its most vanilla form before I start customizing the theme for my own site. It's based on the default theme from today's downloads: ZP 1.1.5, and the Galleria 1.0b code.

Galleria/ZP theme Current Version v0.5:
http://alexwilson.dyndns.org/filez/galleria05.zip

New themes are always welcome. Let us know when you are done, then we will glady add it to our themes page!

One note: jQuery is already included in zenphoto (zp-core/js), so you don't need to include it in the theme.

Still a work in progress, but for anyone who wants to follow along, I've got it up on my live site:
http://alexwilsonphoto.com/gallery/

The trickiest part seems to be getting the interface to deal well with albums with a lot of pictures. I've got a few changes in that help a lot, including using the ZP-generated thumbs instead of letting the Galleria resize the full images to make thumbs, which seemed to really chug the browser on big galleries. Having the scroller area also removes the need to move the view once there are more than a row or two worth of thumbs.

Any feedback on the theme so far is welcome!

Looks and works great. I might try implementing a bit of this on my site. Only thing that doesn't quite fit right in the theme is the scroll bar at the bottom, but maybe a bit of styling can improve that. Well done.

I like it. Looks great. Any chance of sharing the source code for image.php?

The only thing that does not blend in is the scroll bar at the bottom. I have not looked at galleria, but can you have some sort of auto-scroll depending on the position of the mouse?

or can you change the color of the scroll bar to dark?

Galleria doesn't have the scroller area -- I added that, since having several rows of thumbs made the page a pain because you had to move back up to the image.

Changing the style of the scrollers is just a bit of CSS and pretty easy -- but it's an IE-only thing, I think. Auto-scrolling is trickier, I'll have to look at the JavaScript involved to do that.

I'm planning on making the theme source available once it's more-or-less done.

Nice work, will keep an eye on it for possible future use. :)

AlexWilson, for the scroll bar at the bottom you might be interessted in this here: http://sorgalla.com/jcarousel/ (done with jQuery)

that carousel looks really nice!