Galleries and archive
The photographs are still in somebody's loft
Most of an institution's visual history sits in shoeboxes and on old phones. Albums publish what you already hold, and the submissions queue is how the rest of it reaches you without anyone posting an envelope.
Albums
What an album is, and what it is not#
An album has a title, a cover image, an era tag and its own SEO title and description. Inside it, each item has an image, a caption and a position you set by dragging. The public gets an index of albums and a page per album.
What is not there: nested folders, tagging beyond the era field, face recognition, per-photo permissions and any kind of automatic sorting by date taken. It is a small, legible model, which is the right one for a committee that changes every two years.
The submissions queue
Alumni send you the pictures nobody else has#
Step 1
A member submits from the member area
An image and whatever they can tell you about it. The route is throttled to ten submissions an hour per member, so an enthusiastic afternoon cannot flood the queue.
Step 2
It waits in the admin panel
Submissions land in their own moderation screen. Nothing is published by arriving, and nothing appears on the public site in the meantime.
Step 3
A committee member publishes it
Publishing creates the gallery item in the album you choose and links back to the submission, so a year later you can still see who sent a photograph and when.
One wiring quirk to know about. The submissions queue lives in the contact area of the admin panel rather than the galleries area. That means it is not hidden when you switch the Galleries module off, and it means a volunteer who moderates submissions needs the contact permission rather than the galleries one. Worth knowing before you hand out access.
Weight
Nothing is resized, so mind the file sizes#
AlumDeck stores uploads verbatim. There is no server-side resizing anywhere in the product: no thumbnails, no lighter-format conversion, no orientation correction. The image tool in the admin panel crops in the browser before upload, which helps, but only if whoever is uploading uses it.
The practical rule: a scanned photograph at around 1,600 pixels wide looks right on every screen and keeps an album fast. A twelve-megapixel original does not, and every visitor pays for it.
Questions about galleries and the archive#
How do alumni send us photographs?
A signed-in member opens the uploads screen in the member area and submits an image with whatever they know about it. It lands in a moderation queue in the admin panel. Nothing a member sends appears on the public site until a committee member publishes it into an album.
Are uploaded images resized or compressed?
No. Files are stored exactly as they arrive. There are no thumbnails, no conversion to a lighter format and no rotation fix for a photograph taken sideways. A gallery of twenty modern phone photographs is a heavy page, so crop and shrink before you publish.
Where are the files kept?
On your own disk, inside your own hosting account, in a real directory rather than a symbolic link, because shared hosts frequently refuse to serve symlinked folders. They are included in the nightly media backup.
Can we organise albums by era?
Yes. An album carries an era tag alongside its title, cover image and its own SEO fields, and items inside an album have captions and a sort order you drag. There are no nested folders and no tags beyond that.
What if the person in a photograph objects?
Delete the item, and the file is removed with it. There is no request workflow for that and no takedown queue, so it is a job for whoever holds the galleries permission.
Look at an album and the moderation queue
Both are switched on in the demo, and the admin panel is open.