Photo Album

[cdevers at pobox.com (Chris Devers)]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Cole Tuininga wrote:

> Hi all - I'm looking to replace my current web based photo album
> software as the current one has some security issues.  Anybody have
> suggestions for or against any particular software? 

You never actually specify what software you're trying to move away from.
That might be relevant for anyone trying to make suggestions :)

> My feature requirements are that it be able to handle multiple albums,
> have "sub" albums/folders, and most importantly, needs to allow the
> viewer to choose the resolution they wish to view at.  It would be nice
> if it also supported me being able to add comments to the pictures as
> well. 

<aol />

I've also been looking for something like this. 

The most popular application for this kind of thing seems to be PHP
Gallery <http://gallery.menalto.com/>, but I wasn't very impressed with
what I've seen of it. (Why do PHP engines always look so... amateur? Or
something, I can't put my finger on it, but the tiny sans-serif fonts and 
the near-ubiquitous smiley icons really grate on me for some reason...)

SpiderEyeBalls <http://www.spidereyeballs.com/> is IMO much slicker than
Gallery, but it may not be quite as flexible. (Then again, I may just be
confusing the design of the SEB pages with the interesting photography of
the guy who writes the software -- that is, his photos are interesting, so
the site & its software picks up some of that shine.) 

I really like <http://husk.org/pics/>, which is run by a homemade photo
gallery application called Stem. The pages all look nice, but I
particularly like the touch of using CSS to superimpose captions directly
over the images. Also, and this one is a big deal for me, site visitors
seem to be able to add comments -- I really want a photo site engine that
has this capability, and Stem is the only one I'm aware of -- aside from
some MovableType blog hacks -- that provides this capability.


The other feature I'd like in a photo site engine would be an architecture
that is friendly to people who can scp/rsync over new photo directories. 
That way, I could just copy over a fresh batch of photos to my web server,
and the photo engine would -- maybe as a cron job -- find the new content
and do various forms of auto-magic (make thumbnails, build & cache pages,
etc). I don't want to have to upload everything through a web form if I
can just as easily copy the files over and tell the server where to look
for new content (or better still, let it be auto-discovered). 

Most photo site software I'm aware of doesn't really work that way. 


I'm also interested in suggestions.


-- 
Chris Devers