Philosophy and goals

Photos don't change a lot. Performance matters. Discussions and comments can be held through other channels. No one likes yet another forum, mailing list or website to check for discussions within their social graph.

Scope

An image gallery application for our Study Association should provide:

  • Photos for viewing/browsing.
  • Downloading photos.

And not a whole lot else. There may be orthogonal concerns, but pxl will generally choose to defer their implementation to other tools.

Privacy

GDPR and laws aside, privacy-aware design and systems building is just the ethical thing to do. We want pxl to:

  • Play nice with existing authentication systems.
  • Provide a "request takedown" button.
  • Strip unneccessary EXIF metadata from photos.

N.B.: This seems to conflict with "download photos for later" from earlier. And to a certain extend, it does. However, once you've given someone a piece of information, you cannot take it back. This is true for everything though.

Performance and mobile

Visiting a single page shouldn't take ages. It also shouldn't consume half your mobile data plan. This saves both time and money. We want pxl to:

  • Compress photos (without loads of quality loss)
  • Load different image sizes as appropriate for the view. Don't download a 1MB image to display it at 400x300 pixels.

User experience

Browsing image galleries should be a nice experience for the user. Users rightfully expect all the standard stuff that browsers have been doing for ages to work. In particular:

  • Navigation/history works like expected.
  • Links work in the standard manner.
  • Image galleries should be useable without JavaScript enabled. JavaScript may be used for progressive enhancement when appropriate.

Admin experience

Last on the list, and the least of the priorities at the start. pxl provides a CLI application that people can run in their terminal (if they have Python installed). This enables us to make progress quickly and to get things out of the door.

Maybe we'll eventually provide a way to make it easier for non-technical users to manage photo libraries. It is last on the list of goals at the moment, though.