SmallNetBuilder

Photo Gallery

The last media feature in the 3200 is the Photo Gallery. I first thought that it was missing, since I didn't see an option for it in the admin interface. But I found that you need to create a user account, then log in as a user. This gets you to an entirely different user interface (Figure 8).

Figure 8: User Interface - WebDisk

You land at the WebDisk option, which allows file browsing, up and download via your web browser. This interface (and the admin interface) is also available via secure HTTPS access. But you need to use https:// in your URL; the N3200 won't automatically redirect you from HTTP to HTTPS.

Clicking the Photos button takes you first to a page showing all users that have photo albums. Note that there is a default "http" user that isn't a functional album. Clicking on your icon takes you to a blank album page, where you click the "+" icon in the upper right-hand corner to create an album. Figure 9 shows my album page with two albums that I have created. One has a cover photo, which I was able to create using the upper-right Cover icon.

Figure 9: Photo Albums

The Upload Photo feature handles individual files only (up to 9 at a time), but lets you enter a 20 character "Subject" (title) and 100 character "Description" (caption) for each. I really find this one-at-a-time method annoying, so checked to see if a folder of images that I manually copied to my photos folder using drag-and-drop would show up, and it did.

But I first had to log out and back into the admin interface to make my photo folder public. It was the only way that I could get rid of the Windows login box that popped up when I tried to browse to my photo folder and that refused to accept the N3200 user name and password that I had created.

Once I got the folder uploaded, I logged back into the User interface and found that an album had been created, complete with 100x100 (max) thumbnails. Figure 10 shows the Album page, which allows adding, deleting and editing photos.

Figure 10: Photo Gallery - Album Page

Editing is limited to Subjects and Descriptions; you can't change the order of pictures. Picture order seems to be determined by the order in which pictures are added. Adding photos makes them appear at the beginning of the album.

Clicking on a photo in the Album page takes you to that photo's page (Figure 11). Navigation from photo to photo is done with the "filmstrip" at the bottom of the page. The arrow icon down there doesn't start the slideshow (that icon is at the upper right), but advances to the next group of five images. Clicking the EXIF link brings up that data. Clicking the images itself opens a new browser tab or window with the full-sized image.

Figure 11: Photo Gallery - Photo page

The N3200's Photo Gallery is better than I have seen on some NASes, but still could use some work. As noted, you can't reorder images, but more importantly, you can't change either thumbnail or individual images sizes. You also can't change timing in the slideshow, which also lacks any image transition effects.