Using other 3rd party gallery extension stored images in RapidGallery

This is a blog post to show you how easy it is to reuse an existing 3rd party gallery extension directory to show your images in RapidGallery. The way RapidGallery works by showing your images on the frontend is simply but searching and indexing thru a directory of your choice that you have specified. It will then do all the hard work of creating thumbnail images for you and any further customization can be applied such as size, dimensions, effects and etc. It's really that simply. Most or probably all 3rd party gallery extensions will create their own directory to store your image files in to be used.

This directory is a sub directory that lives inside /images directory in your Joomla installation. However, in some cases it might not be so as it is not mandatory to have all uploaded files stored under the /image directory. So you may need to poke around your Joomla! installed directory to see. But for the sake of keeping it simple for this blog post, we are going to assume most of the uploaded image directories created by 3rd party extensions will be located inside /images directory. It is the directory that core media manager points to, by default.

In the screenshot (below), i have used media manager to show you the directory structure under /images after installing several 3rd party gallery extensions.

As you can see, there are other directories which have been created by the 3rd party gallery extensions (by default). Now that we know you where to locate those 3rd party gallery directories, we only need to simply tell RapidGallery where to locate the images and create a gallery. There are two ways of doing this:

1. RapidGallery module

• Navigate to module manager and find Rapid Gallery Module
• Under the image options settings, there is a field called 'Images folder path'. Just enter the path to the image directory you want. For example, if you have Phoca Gallery installed, just simply enter images/phocagallery (don't worry about leading/trailing slashes, RapidGallery will automatically clean this up for you).
• RapidGallery should then do the work of creating the image thumbs and gallery.

2. RapidGallery plugin

• You may have many other gallery extensions installed. But lets take Ozio Gallery 3 as an example because i so happen to come across this earlier. You want to show all images in Ozio Gallery 3 (the folder name is oziogallery3), you just need to add RapidGallery tag to your content item to display the gallery. We do this by adding: {rapidgallery skin:pirobox_extended;}images/oziogallery3{/rapidgallery} in your content item, it is that simple. Note: skin:pirobox_extended is one of the many skins available to use, there are many more. Have a look at the plugin parameter list under skins.
• RapidGallery should then do all the work for you of creating the thumbs and displaying them on the frontend of your page.

You're not limited to just a gallery you can have as many galleries as you want so long as you load another instance of the module and set a different directory path to the images or if using plugin method, add another gallery tag and set the path to the image directory your want.

This should work in most cases but there probably some extensions you'll need to be careful with. There maybe a few out there but one i know of is Gallery Cat Pro which does not create a separate folder for its thumbnail images. Instead, it creates thumbnail images and store them in the same directory where the original uploaded images are kept. This means that RapidGallery will render any of the images it finds located in that same directory (ie both thumbnail and original images). So be careful and double check first.

So what is the advantages of this? simply put it, it means that if you already have an existing gallery running on your site that you're not very satified with and want to switch to use RapidGallery but you have 100s of photos that you do not wish to re-upload again. This could be a total time saver as you only need to tell RapidGallery where to locate the existing images are and it does the magic of creating the gallery for you.