New utility for working with Galleries on blogs.msdn.com

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Download the utility at the Nmag Download Page.

I started to get really annoyed by the UI that CommunityServer exposes for the Gallery. It is incredibly inconvinient for me (both when inserting images to a post and when actually uploading images).

So I ended up writing the Nmag utility (No More Annoying Gallery) which has some of the most basic and most often used (by me) features of the Gallery.

There is one glaring ommision right now in the utility and that's the ability to update images on the server - this is due to the fact that the CommunityServer Web Service that allows you to manipulate the gallery feature is buggy and will not let me update the image. :( The workaround currently is to re-upload the image and delete the original one.

In any case, here are the features that will hopefuly make managing images in the gallery easier:

1. The utility exposes three tab-pages. The rightmost one is an editor that lets you paste images and manipulate them. The middle one is a report of what images where successfuly uploaded. The last one allows you to watch your gallery.

2. When pasting images into the "Images" tab, you get the meta-data information (subject, description, categories) so that you can manipulate them. You can work with multiple items at the same time:

 

3. To publish, simply select the images you want in the selector and click the publish toolbar button. This will make the images upload to the Gallery:

4. When editing information about an image, you can choose what categories you want it to reside in:

 

5. When working images, you have some rudimentary features you can use to edit it. The two currently supported are adding a black border and cropping the image:

6. Cropping gives you a basic UI to determine how the image will look:

7. Lastly, you can also browse your online gallery (and open items from it):

8. In the Gallery Viewer, you can also copy links to the images so you dont have to go through the horrible "Add Image" UI that is supplied to you:

That's about it. You can open files from disk, files from the gallery and you can just paste images if you want.

If you have ideas for other useful features, let me know.