I know that some of you out there are using The Turning Gate web plug-ins either to create your entire website or to post a few galleries. If you’ve ever wanted your visitors to be able to search your site for images, your wish has been granted. GallerySearch for CE3 has just been released. This utility, created by TTG user Daniel Leu in cooperation with The Turning Gate, first indexes your gallery folder structure. It also allows for the exclusion of specific folders. So if you have private galleries or a client area, you can exclude those folders from indexing and thus from the search results. After the indexing is done your visitors can use the search form to search your site. The actual search function looks at file names, titles, captions, and keywords. There’s also an option to search on keywords only.
There are a couple of requirements though. This only works with TTG CE3 Gallery version 5.2.3 or newer and TTG Publisher. The index function can only index albums created with TTG Publisher. Also note that if you want keywords to be searchable, you need to use TTG CE3 Gallery 5.2.3 or newer to create your Publisher templates. You’ll also need to republish all your albums. Fortunately, you won’t need to republish the images themselves, just check the “Push Metadata” box in Publisher set up. This way, just the metadata is updated, which is a quick process. If you have traditionally uploaded galleries on your site, GallerySearch won’t work on those, you’ll need to transition those images to Publisher managed albums.

The search itself is a simple Boolean “and” search. What this means is that if you enter more than one word in the search window, the results will contain only those images that have all three words. However, you’ll also get links to search results for each individual word. So in that respect, it’s also an “or” search.
Implementation is easy. There’s just a folder to upload to your site. Inside of this folder is one file that you’ll need to modify for your own particular needs. You can also easily change the default text on the search page.

Feel free to give this at try on my site. You can access the search function either from my Galleries page or on the dedicated search page. One thing this search function has revealed is the inadequate job I’ve done keywording. It’s not that I don’t add keywords, it’s just that I could have done a better job.
For more information of capabilities and set up, visit Daniel’s GallerySearch documentation page. Visit the TTG shop to purchase GallerySearch for CE3.