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Are there any good photo / video web albums that use HTML5 to good effect yet?

I'm kinda hooked on http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/album/ , which has the simplest, most straightforward interface of all the other things I've tried. And it makes a good attempt at handling video. I have a simple shell script that imports pics from my Canon camera, converts the mjpegs to .mp4, and tosses it into my ~/public_html/pictures directory indexed by Album.

http://gallery.menalto.com/ is also one of my favorites, but it's a bit too labor intensive for a photo archive... I do try to load some of the nicest shots in it, though, for all the comments and other features..

Well, I drink straight from the spigot

I found JAlbum to be impractical for a large collection of pictures. Large is more than 2,000.

JAlbum kept getting out of memory when generating albums. There were three of four fixes for this but they didn't work, rather than just pushed the problem back (crash after 3,000 images, not after 2,500).

JAlbum also was regenerating ALL albums when I was only adding a new one. That was a pain. I don't know if they fixed it since.

Also I was a bit concerned with all those configuration and caption files that started to appear here and there.

I am using album now for a long time. It is a rather powerful perl script that does all that I want, except for tagging and searching.

I don't like renaming images, so I don't. Ever. I also don't like to have captions separated from the images, so I keep them in JPEG/EXIF comments (easy editing with many tools). I than generated a captions.txt file with a simple shell script and run album to generate the HTML and thumbnails.

Album is somewhat slowly developed, but the next version will hopefully have support for plugins and things will get easier from there on.

An rmra atom holds pointers ( stored in rmda atoms) to other movies located somewhere else. Typically they are only found in Reference Movies.

Is the file with the rmra atom only a couple of k in size? If so, you probably ended up with a reference movie. Try doing what I described here (or use this handy script) to track down the real movie file.

Example: xine `debed http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/t3-int ernational/largeplayer.html`

I wouldn't mind some feedback, especially if someone can tell me how I can determine whether a file is an actual quicktime or one of these stream files - currently the tool only handles the stream types mentioned in the post.

debed

Yep, that's what IPTC fields, and a misc directory, are for. Throw something like this into grep, and grep those fields based on the file's magic number. Of course, that assumes that someone didn't already add that type of function to grep :)

Oh, here's a caption indexing program. You should be using your IPTC fields when creating your images (Whoops, that would be self-organization), and this program will create an index based on your captions. Grep that! :P

I'm sorry, but all these tools already exist. A new filesystem isn't necessary. IPTC fields are huge, and wouldn't really work with this new os-level filesystem. If you're looking for pictures, you query the IPTC fields. If you're looking for an email, you should use a proper subject.

Again, it's just people looking for an easy way out of organizing.

While there are some nice packages such as Gallery, IDS, My Photo Gallery, and others, I prefer Album. (Actually, I prefer Album plus my fixes and enhancements.) The one reason that I don't like albums that have server-based components to them is that they tend to do all sorts of image resizing operations at runtime, making them horribly slow.

Album, on the other hand, recognizes that photos are static content, and takes the performance hit of generating thumbnail galleries and web-friendly images right up front (i.e. offline), and as a result, the speed that end users see is limited only by how fast Apache can serve up files.

The approach that I am taking for long-term archival is to burn Album-generated photo albums into CDs, such that the only requirement to view them will be a browser. HTML and JPGs are so pervasive, I don't see them being replaced anytime soon. I can burn a CD, send it via snail mail to my Mom, and she can browse away easily (including "themes"). The same cannot be done with these [php- | cgi- | perl-] based solutions that require some server software to be setup and configured.

The only advantage that the server-based programs provide is the ability to add comments, but that seems overrated IMHO. -Steve

I've used Marginal Hack's Album before, at the time it seemed to be the easiest and best solution. It is a Perl script that generates static html pages with the images you supply. It has template support so you can customize the way the gallery looks and it is popular enough that there are several decent templates already created. One feature I liked was the optional ability to create a thumbnail, a web sized pic and retain the link to the original full sized image.

Gallery seems to do all this and more. One question I couldn't find in the docs, does Gallery dynamically resize images as the users request them or does it resize them as they are uploaded? Album brought my old linux box to its knees resizing the photos I fed it, I'd rather do that once than every time someone visited the page.

Cool, maybe I'll get around to getting some more photos online, my family will thank you :)

If you have your own server, look for a Apache / PHP solution. Plenty of them.