[Techtalk] Picture gallery

[Mary]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003, Sara wrote:
> I was wondering if you knew about some "picture gallery" application,
> to generate thumbnails for a web page from the pictures of a
> directory? I'm trying to use "gimp web gallery", but it gives an error
> half way.

Here's a compare and contrast for you, because I haven't seen many in
this thread yet.

Gallery (already mentioned):
        - Language: PHP. I have no problems with this, but it can mean
          leaving some world-writeable directories around if you want to
          enable web-uploading. My host was not happy.
        
        - Customisability: seems relatively low. Many sites using
          gallery retain a "gallery look". Search Google for "Powered by
          Gallery" for a representative sample. You can redo colours.
          
        - Ease of use: I couldn't get it going because to use the web
          interface you need to have PHP file uploading turned on. I'm
          told it's fine.
          
          It has a web interface for uploading and captioning photos.
          You can also upload them with FTP/SCP/whatever, but I don't
          know if you can caption them any other way.
          
        - Features: Thumbnails etc, albums and sub-albums, password
          protected albums, ability to create different users who can
          upload their own photos, that nice effect where the link to
          the album is a photo from that album, people can leave
          comments ont the web site.

Album (already mentioned, my current choice):
        - Language: emPerl, generates static HTML pages

        - Customisability: High. You can completely redesign the
          appearance of all pages, except for the link back to the
          author's home page. You must be willing to do a bit of
          "hacking around" (moving pieces of code around) to do this.

        - Easy of use: You put the files in the directory they're meant
          to be in, the captions go in a text file, and then you run
          album in the top directory from the command line. Many Linux
          users are comfortable with that, some won't be.

        - Features: Thumbnails, subalbums, variety of existing themes
          you can use. If you developed your own theme you could
          probably replicate the gallery look.

        - Licence: Not Free Software. You must contribute all changes
          back to the author[1]. This leaves the copyright status of any
          themes you develop pretty strongly in doubt. The code includes
          a link back to his home page in every page it generates. (It
          also generates non-XHTML META tags, so you can't write an
          XHTML theme - I know, I tried. He did tell me he'd change that
          in the next version.)

Bins (noone's mentioned this):

        - Language: not sure, but it's another one that generates static
          HTML.

        - Customisability: you can customise the colours (well, if you
          edit the code you can customise anything, but without editing
          the code it's not as customisable as album).

        - Features: Thumbnails, subalbums, extracts the tags from your
          digicam images and puts the focal length etc on the page. It
          has an associated GTK application that lets you rotate your
          images and associate captions etc with them - image details
          are stored in an XML file.

-Mary

[1] Morbid of me, but I always always wonder when I see this: "Is there
something in your will that changes the licence when you die?" Otherwise
their software becomes unchangeable then, although the inheritor of
their copyright could also redo the licence.