Web photo management - are there any simple systems?
I have a couple of family members who have photo albums on the web which I host. For the past two or three years I have been using gallery2 to do this but I'm getting increasingly fed up with the hassle involved whenever anything changes. A recent OS upgrade has made the gallery2 installations fall in a heap yet again and I'm wondering if I might find something easier than gallery2. Apart from not being easy to upgrade it requires quite a few non-standard changes to php.ini which I'd prefer to avoid if I can, and it uses a mysql database which I'd also like to avoid if I can. My two users don't need most of gallery2's abilities, all they want to do is to be able to upload photographs and organise them into albums with (presumably) thumbnails to select them. There's no need for multiple users, no need for tags, no need for extra information, just the EXIF and IPTC from the image files. So is there anything out there that can do this with as little hassle as possible? -- Chris Green
On 05 Jan 21:29, Chris Green wrote:
I have a couple of family members who have photo albums on the web which I host. For the past two or three years I have been using gallery2 to do this but I'm getting increasingly fed up with the hassle involved whenever anything changes.
A recent OS upgrade has made the gallery2 installations fall in a heap yet again and I'm wondering if I might find something easier than gallery2. Apart from not being easy to upgrade it requires quite a few non-standard changes to php.ini which I'd prefer to avoid if I can, and it uses a mysql database which I'd also like to avoid if I can.
My two users don't need most of gallery2's abilities, all they want to do is to be able to upload photographs and organise them into albums with (presumably) thumbnails to select them. There's no need for multiple users, no need for tags, no need for extra information, just the EXIF and IPTC from the image files.
So is there anything out there that can do this with as little hassle as possible?
Obvious questions: - Do they need to be able to upload them through the website? - Do they really need the EXIF and IPTC from the image files? - Would a statically generated gallery be OK for them? I mostly ask those because many many moons ago I wrote a small bash script (bpgallery.sh) that will take a directory of images and generate a bunch of static HTML from it, it's themeable but doesn't currently pull any EXIF or IPTC from the images - it's fairly dumb, infact, but it (mostly) works - I know there are some users on the list too... If you want to try it out to see if it mostly fulfils your needs then it's available from: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/ As it says there, though, I currently use django to do my photo albums, and only use bpgallery.sh when I need a quickly put together gallery that's not part of my main website - though, I am happy to accept suggestions for improvements, and patches etc - it's worked for at least the last 5 years for various things when I've needed it, and it's gone through various versions of debian and underlying support programs... it even (last time I checked) works on Mac OSX. Cheers, -- Brett Parker
On 06-Jan-2012 Brett Parker wrote:
On 05 Jan 21:29, Chris Green wrote:
I have a couple of family members who have photo albums on the web which I host. For the past two or three years I have been using gallery2 to do this but I'm getting increasingly fed up with the hassle involved whenever anything changes.
A recent OS upgrade has made the gallery2 installations fall in a heap yet again and I'm wondering if I might find something easier than gallery2. Apart from not being easy to upgrade it requires quite a few non-standard changes to php.ini which I'd prefer to avoid if I can, and it uses a mysql database which I'd also like to avoid if I can.
My two users don't need most of gallery2's abilities, all they want to do is to be able to upload photographs and organise them into albums with (presumably) thumbnails to select them. There's no need for multiple users, no need for tags, no need for extra information, just the EXIF and IPTC from the image files.
So is there anything out there that can do this with as little hassle as possible?
Obvious questions: - Do they need to be able to upload them through the website? - Do they really need the EXIF and IPTC from the image files? - Would a statically generated gallery be OK for them?
I mostly ask those because many many moons ago I wrote a small bash script (bpgallery.sh) that will take a directory of images and generate a bunch of static HTML from it, it's themeable but doesn't currently pull any EXIF or IPTC from the images - it's fairly dumb, infact, but it (mostly) works - I know there are some users on the list too...
If you want to try it out to see if it mostly fulfils your needs then it's available from: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/
Results: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh SommitRealWeird Home > Development > bpgallery.sh Sorry, couldn't find what you were looking for. Oops. !!!! However: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/ works fine. So what's the difference between *** and ***/ ? Generally, I've always considered the final "/" to be superfluous, but apparently not. (This is the first time I have found that it matters). That said, thanks Brett! Ted.
As it says there, though, I currently use django to do my photo albums, and only use bpgallery.sh when I need a quickly put together gallery that's not part of my main website - though, I am happy to accept suggestions for improvements, and patches etc - it's worked for at least the last 5 years for various things when I've needed it, and it's gone through various versions of debian and underlying support programs... it even (last time I checked) works on Mac OSX.
Cheers, -- Brett Parker
---------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding@wlandres.net> Date: 06-Jan-2012 Time: 00:53:23 This message was sent by XFMail ----------------------------------
On 06 Jan 01:00, Ted Harding wrote:
Results:
https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh SommitRealWeird Home > Development > bpgallery.sh Sorry, couldn't find what you were looking for. Oops.
!!!!
Yup - that's why there was a / at the end of the URL ;)
However:
https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/
works fine. So what's the difference between *** and ***/ ? Generally, I've always considered the final "/" to be superfluous, but apparently not. (This is the first time I have found that it matters).
The site is django powered, it used to be a default to require the trailing slash, and I quite like that default - it's a canonical url for the data... I might turn on the magic redirect option that takes a url with out a ending / and redirects it if needed, ISTR that there's a django middleware for it, I've just never bothered enabling it because it's never been a problem for me or the search engines :)
That said, thanks Brett!
-- Brett Parker
On 06/01/12 00:44, Brett Parker wrote:
On 05 Jan 21:29, Chris Green wrote:
I have a couple of family members who have photo albums on the web which I host. For the past two or three years I have been using gallery2 to do this but I'm getting increasingly fed up with the hassle involved whenever anything changes.
So is there anything out there that can do this with as little hassle as possible?
Obvious questions: - Do they need to be able to upload them through the website? - Do they really need the EXIF and IPTC from the image files? - Would a statically generated gallery be OK for them?
If you want to try it out to see if it mostly fulfils your needs then it's available from: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/
I too have a home written scripts. I use them on 4 different web sites for photo albums. If you like it I can send it to you. You can view how it looks here. http://nevilley.no-ip.org/PhotoGalleries/main.php -- nev
On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 08:36:07AM +0000, nev young wrote:
On 06/01/12 00:44, Brett Parker wrote:
On 05 Jan 21:29, Chris Green wrote:
I have a couple of family members who have photo albums on the web which I host. For the past two or three years I have been using gallery2 to do this but I'm getting increasingly fed up with the hassle involved whenever anything changes.
So is there anything out there that can do this with as little hassle as possible?
Obvious questions: - Do they need to be able to upload them through the website? - Do they really need the EXIF and IPTC from the image files? - Would a statically generated gallery be OK for them?
If you want to try it out to see if it mostly fulfils your needs then it's available from: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/
I too have a home written scripts. I use them on 4 different web sites for photo albums. If you like it I can send it to you. You can view how it looks here.
I think the fundamental thing that my users need is the ability to upload photographs from remote places (usually internet cafes or hotels with wifi). Apart from that a basically static site would be fine I suspect. They'd be happy enough to have the site update with new images once a day or so. -- Chris Green
On 6 January 2012 12:39, Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 08:36:07AM +0000, nev young wrote:
On 06/01/12 00:44, Brett Parker wrote:
If you want to try it out to see if it mostly fulfils your needs then it's available from: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/
I too have a home written scripts. I use them on 4 different web sites for photo albums. If you like it I can send it to you. You can view how it looks here.
I think the fundamental thing that my users need is the ability to upload photographs from remote places (usually internet cafes or hotels with wifi). Apart from that a basically static site would be fine I suspect. They'd be happy enough to have the site update with new images once a day or so.
You could setup an FTP server and then use cron to automatically run a script regularly to autogenerate the static gallery and publish it on a webserver, using Brett or nev's scripts. Assuming your users would be comfortable using FTP ... Peter.
On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 01:13:50PM +0000, samwise wrote:
On 6 January 2012 12:39, Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> wrote:
On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 08:36:07AM +0000, nev young wrote:
On 06/01/12 00:44, Brett Parker wrote:
If you want to try it out to see if it mostly fulfils your needs then it's available from: https://www.sommitrealweird.co.uk/development/bpgallerysh/
I too have a home written scripts. I use them on 4 different web sites for photo albums. If you like it I can send it to you. You can view how it looks here.
I think the fundamental thing that my users need is the ability to upload photographs from remote places (usually internet cafes or hotels with wifi). Apart from that a basically static site would be fine I suspect. They'd be happy enough to have the site update with new images once a day or so.
You could setup an FTP server and then use cron to automatically run a script regularly to autogenerate the static gallery and publish it on a webserver, using Brett or nev's scripts.
Assuming your users would be comfortable using FTP ...
It's a possibility, it would certainly simplify maintenance compared with gallery2. -- Chris Green
On Fri, 6 Jan 2012 13:47:36 +0000 Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> allegedly wrote:
On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 01:13:50PM +0000, samwise wrote:
Assuming your users would be comfortable using FTP ...
It's a possibility, it would certainly simplify maintenance compared with gallery2.
As people here have said before, please don't use FTP. It is a truly horrible, ancient, insecure protocol. Use sftp in preference. Mick
On 6 January 2012 13:58, mick <mbm@rlogin.net> wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jan 2012 13:47:36 +0000 Chris Green <cl@isbd.net> allegedly wrote:
On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 01:13:50PM +0000, samwise wrote:
Assuming your users would be comfortable using FTP ...
It's a possibility, it would certainly simplify maintenance compared with gallery2.
As people here have said before, please don't use FTP. It is a truly horrible, ancient, insecure protocol. Use sftp in preference.
Mick
The FTP protocol is perfectly suited to the job it does - it's up to the administrator and the user to ensure it's used appropriately. In this case, I suggested FTP because even really old Windows clients which you might find in internet cafes around the world will come with command line FTP clients or drag and drop support in older versions of IE. Secure FTP may well require either an additional client (e.g. PSFTP or FileZilla Client) download or the running of one from a USB stick ... maybe that's possible in some/most/all/none internet cafes ... but until you get to wherever you're going and see what the facilities are, you can never be sure. FTP on the other hand is pretty much as ubiquitous as the web is. Setting up the FTP server using e.g. proFTPd to be write-only, with an appropriate upload limit, would IMO be secure enough for the purpose described. In theory someone can snoop the password, but all that will let them do is upload their own pictures to the server which would admittedly get published automatically. If you're exceptionally paranoid about that tho, you simply script a quick secured moderation app which only publishes the photos to the public website when they have been approved by someone via the web - either the person travelling or someone back home. Maybe there is a need for end-to-end encryption of these photos over the internet but if they're regular travel snaps, I wouldn't be concerned about them being snooped in transit. Most people, knowingly or not, take that risk when emailing photos around. Off-topic, I also make use of FTP on sites for providing anonymous public uploads where the data being uploaded is not of any private or secret nature - again with write-only access and a disk quota. At the end of the day, security is always a trade-off against usability and should be applied with thought to the circumstances. In this case, I'd personally still choose to use FTP for this purpose for the benefits of global usability over the - IMO - limited extra security SFTP would provide in this case... Peter. P.S. Not entirely related, but I just discovered a rather nice beta photo app for Android: http://www.xotof.com/ This uses a REST API to allow you to both browse and upload photos to a Gallery 3 installation from an Android device. Quite handy, even if it is only in beta atm.
samwise <samwise@bagshot-row.org>
In this case, I suggested FTP because even really old Windows clients which you might find in internet cafes around the world will come with command line FTP clients or drag and drop support in older versions of IE. [...]
And they'll also come with password sniffers. So you might have one that's write-only with a quota, but that's a faff. Anyway, some cafes do not allow command line access and (as mentioned above) the newer IE doesn't do FTP so the widest usability is perhaps a HTTPS upload page nowadays and you could check a subset of a password as well as take a username/passphrase to defeat sniffers. Regards, -- MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op. http://koha-community.org supporter, web and library systems developer. In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html Available for hire (including development) at http://www.software.coop/
On Fri, Jan 06, 2012 at 12:44:40AM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
On 05 Jan 21:29, Chris Green wrote:
I have a couple of family members who have photo albums on the web which I host. For the past two or three years I have been using gallery2 to do this but I'm getting increasingly fed up with the hassle involved whenever anything changes.
A recent OS upgrade has made the gallery2 installations fall in a heap yet again and I'm wondering if I might find something easier than gallery2. Apart from not being easy to upgrade it requires quite a few non-standard changes to php.ini which I'd prefer to avoid if I can, and it uses a mysql database which I'd also like to avoid if I can.
My two users don't need most of gallery2's abilities, all they want to do is to be able to upload photographs and organise them into albums with (presumably) thumbnails to select them. There's no need for multiple users, no need for tags, no need for extra information, just the EXIF and IPTC from the image files.
So is there anything out there that can do this with as little hassle as possible?
Obvious questions: - Do they need to be able to upload them through the website?
Yes, in fact that's one of the major reasons for doing it, both my family 'customers' are globe-trotting and want to send pictures from their cameras to the web site - and as a consequence have them saved on my server.
- Do they really need the EXIF and IPTC from the image files?
Possibly not, though any annotations (IMHO) should be in EXIF and IPTC so that moving the pictures about takes the information with them.
- Would a statically generated gallery be OK for them?
Probably, but they need to be ablet to send photos to it. -- Chris Green
On 06/01/12 12:36, Chris Green wrote: [] Perhaps a very silly question, but could they manage with using one of the freely available things like Flickr, Picassa, or even Facebook or Google+. They could upload and organise the photos as they wanted, have albums, add locations etc. All without you having to do anything! Or am I missing a point? Steve
On Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 11:51:24AM +0000, steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk wrote:
On 06/01/12 12:36, Chris Green wrote: []
Perhaps a very silly question, but could they manage with using one of the freely available things like Flickr, Picassa, or even Facebook or Google+. They could upload and organise the photos as they wanted, have albums, add locations etc. All without you having to do anything!
Or am I missing a point?
They like having the pictures securely stored on my computer(s) at home. I do have a pretty thorough backup system with increment backups going to a NAS in the garage which is 50yds or so from the house so even a fire is very unlikely to destroy the data. I *think* I have a satisfactory solution now by the way, there are some quite neat (and easy to install and maintain) WordPress plugins that manage photo galleries. I'm trying NextGen at this very moment and it seems to do all that's needed (and more) and is also very easy (along with WordPress) to maintain. The sites to which gallery2 was linked were already WordPress sites so this makes a lot of sense, I don't know why I didn't think of it before. -- Chris Green
participants (8)
-
Brett Parker -
Chris Green -
mick -
MJ Ray -
nev young -
samwise -
steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk -
Ted.Harding＠wlandres.net