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[erostew]

Hopefully this isn't a repeat of someone else's request/suggestion.

Currently CPG has the abilty to display galleries with a multitude of different media types. Unfortunately it can be very difficult to make a gallery that is friendly to all those types.

I.E. I have 8,000 photos in 129 albums and 389 videos in 46 albums. I have tweaked and polished a custom theme and I am really happy with the thumb view for pics. But the videos are a pain. Each album is a complete video, split into parts, and I really do NOT want to try and get screencaps to make custom thumbs for every video. So I had the idea to make a custom thumb for the first part of each video with a screencap. For the rest of the segments I use a generic custom thumb with text like "Part 2", etc. What I really wanted was to use just text links and skip the thumbs completely for the videos. I could probably hack a way to do it but that would be ridiculous on a photo gallery.

So the layout works but it just doesn't work as well as I would like. I also ran into a problem with random thumbs because they show the generic thumbs which is not attractive. But that is a problem for another request.

The request: It would be very useful to be able to have a different layout for an album or category based on the media type. For instance I could have a nice thumb based layout for photos and then a layout with 1 thumb and some text links for my multi-part videos. Or maybe a small Icon for custom thumb and a text link beside, etc., etc.

Actually I guess it wouldn't even need to be based on media type if it was possible to have a different layout for each category. But having one layout for photos and one for everything else would likely be easiest.

So it comes down to having the ability to have more than one single thumb layout for the entire gallery. I realize that it is MUCH too complex to think of for 1.5, but maybe NG or later? It would certainly help the transition to a Coppermine Multimedia Gallery. 

I know some people have resorted to running one gallery for photos and one for videos but that's not the best solution IMO.

Regards