I found three great extentions for yii that I combined to achieve a nice basic gallery.
End result: you can mass upload images and directly switch to the gallery view see thumbnails of each image and pressing them displays a big version using fancybox (gallery style or one by one).
Credits goes to the creator of the extentions:
*XUpload
*EJustInTimer
*Fancybox for yii
I just made some additions and put together the tiny code needed to combine them.
How the demo works:
searches images/originals/gallery for pictures and calls the EJustInTimeR widget to create a thumbnail/big version of each image.
Also sets a rel="" attribute (optional) to each image to tell fancybox they belong to the same gallery. You can assign a class for styling each image.
XUpload provides several ways of uploading images/files. The demos from the Xupload extention is in views/file
and a sample for how to use it for the gallery purpose.
I added a property for renaming the uploaded files with a random number if needed.
I find it usefull, hope it helps someone.