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I tried to implement Gallery on my site but couldn't because it requires PHP to be run in Safe Mode. As an alternative, I set-up Coppermine.

I also use Flickr, mainly because it easily allows me to restrict access to certain photos and I can post images directly via email (such as from my phone). And in all honesty, I don't mind someone else managing it. There are other features that I'm only starting to play with, too, like their APIs.

Serious nerds want the ability to host their own sites and customize everything. This flickr site seems cool, but because the tinfoil blocks the waves of complacency, I know better than to trust others with my photographs unless I have TC (total control). I am considering the options. I really want advice instead of a flame war. What are the relative merits of Gallery and Coppermine?

I have read a little. It seems that the 1.4 branch of Gallery has many kludges, and the next big update might be a while yet. Coppermine looks good, but maybe it's development and use are somewhat less. What are the big issues? Are there other good alternatives besides these two?

huzzah for gallery! Also, check out brad choate's mt plugins. I use both gallery + choatery on one site and pure choatery on another

Something else you might be interested is some php munging I did to grab recent photos out of gallery. You can find code + samples here.
-e

I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery now for about 2 years. It's Open Source, based on PHP and MySQL. I've had to do two complete machine moves in that time, and it's handled them both flawlessly.

I think of all the OS projects I've used (and I've been at this a while now), Gallery has brought me the most pleasure. I had more or less put down my digital camera, because I found sharing, storing and cataloging photos publicly too much of a pain. Being able to share my photos with my friends and family has just been a real joy for me. (And before someone says it, they're pictures of my garden, not pr0n ;) ).

Gallery also has a hook to buy photos from Shutterbug (but I haven't been very happy with them so far).

Thanks Gallery!

I'd been thinking about looking into it just to see how well it works. I use Gallery on my hosting account, and run Gallery Remote to upload images.

I also use Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 (as does my Mom), and am looking into running a perl script that will allow me to upload albums directly from PS Album to my Gallery Installation.

Thanks for the tip on Picasa. She might prefer it over PS Album.

I'd been thinking about looking into it just to see how well it works. I use Gallery on my hosting account, and run Gallery Remote to upload images.

I also use Adobe Photoshop Album 2.0 (as does my Mom), and am looking into running a perl script that will allow me to upload albums directly from PS Album to my Gallery Installation.

Thanks for the tip on Picasa. She might prefer it over PS Album.

I wanted to take a moment to plug a couple of things... The first is my personal moblog which really isn't anything special. However, the way the photos are published is kinda unique, and I thought other people might find it nice to play with.

What I use is the rather well-known PHP-based Gallery photo management / presentation software, combined with an implementation of the Nokia Image Upload Server API as a plugin for Gallery.

It works great... I just snap a picture on the phone, go to the Gallery (on the phone) which is where you generally sort through all the pictures, pick Image Uploader then Upload. A GPRS connection is made, you are prompted for the default folder or a new one, and the image is uploaded. That's how I get all the pictures in my moblog. The only limitation is that you cannot caption the photos. The API seems to support it, but it's not implemented in the plugin, nor do the phones support it.

(I looked into this a bit, and here's what I found: Captioning isn't enabled on the server, the phone doesn't prompt for any sort of caption info, and since the phone doesn't detect the capabilities of the server, implementing it on the server won't make any difference. Ah well. At least the photos get there, and you could always rename the file, because that name will be automatically set as the caption in lieu of one.)

I wanted to take a moment to plug a couple of things... The first is my personal moblog which really isn't anything special. However, the way the photos are published is kinda unique, and I thought other people might find it nice to play with.

What I use is the rather well-known PHP-based Gallery photo management / presentation software, combined with an implementation of the Nokia Image Upload Server API as a plugin for Gallery.

It works great... I just snap a picture on the phone, go to the Gallery (on the phone) which is where you generally sort through all the pictures, pick Image Uploader then Upload. A GPRS connection is made, you are prompted for the default folder or a new one, and the image is uploaded. That's how I get all the pictures in my moblog. The only limitation is that you cannot caption the photos. The API seems to support it, but it's not implemented in the plugin, nor do the phones support it.

(I looked into this a bit, and here's what I found: Captioning isn't enabled on the server, the phone doesn't prompt for any sort of caption info, and since the phone doesn't detect the capabilities of the server, implementing it on the server won't make any difference. Ah well. At least the photos get there, and you could always rename the file, because that name will be automatically set as the caption in lieu of one.)

Gallery requires this as well, it isn't a big deal.

And, to top it all off, I found a plugin that exports iPhoto albums to Gallery. Which makes it better than world peace.

Gallery all the way! It's written in PHP, is a dream to install and use, you can have keywords, captions, descriptions, a user system, all within it. Also, it does resizing + image formatting on the fly. IMO, one of it's greatest assets, and the reason I use it on my site (check it out as a working demo if you like), is that it integrates perfectly with PHP-Nuke.

As you may have guessed though, I'm PHP-loving, so this may or may not suit you!

I was a Movable Type user, but with my latest ISP change I ditched MT for Geeklog. Geeklog is really cool, and nicely integrates with Gallery which I use for images. Both are Open Source and free, so the decision was easy.

Your arguments are great but they apply for almost every lanugage I know of.

As for frameworks look at apache. Have you seen how many frameworks it has for java? What about Swing, AWT, SWT etc? Just because they're are lots of frame works doesn't mean it bad.

I agree with your class as a static function library but that's not PHP's fault. C++, Java and Perl have the same problem. When people learn C or VB first and then go to an OO langauge they generally get it wrong.

As for bad projects I sure if you did an "Ask Slashdot" they'd be able to tell you about bad projects C, C++, Lisp, PHP, Java, J2EE, .NET, etc.

As for a standard was of seperating logic from content lots of people say that JSP isn't enough that's why you have stuff like Velocity and all the other framework template engines. If you want a template engine for php the default one is Smarty.

When it come down to it the problem you have with PHP is that it has a lot of newbie programers that use it. Which is good and bad. Try making a simple form in JSP then do the same thing in PHP. PHP is ALOT easier. That doesn't mean it's better but it does mean people with a lower skill can do it. I'm using templates for our internal site and when other people edit it half the time the escape and got back to raw PHP and it's a mess so I fix it up and it's all clean again but they just don't get it untill after I show them then it make sense and they can do it but the next time they can't figure it out so it happens again etc.

Does it mean you get lots of bad half baked libraries YES does it mean you get good libraries and frameworks YES (because more poeple start, so more people get good at it).

If you want to look at good php projects check out:
* Smarty
* Mambo
* Gallery
* phpBB
* JpGraph
* phpMyAdmin

That being said at what level do you move someone from a "HTML + PHP Hack" to a "Web Developer"?

What makes a lanuage "enterprise-ready"? Does an "enterprise" company just have to use it (IE Yahoo and PHP). Or does it have to have faetures?

Where I work we still use PROC and PIC which is a 40 year old language that doesn't have:
* Variable Names - Only numbers!
* Functions - Only GOTO and GO SUB (again numbers no names)
* All variables are global!
* No loops!
* No else - You have to use IF and GOTO!

Yet this is still being used in thousands of companies all over the world! Sure it's legacy but it's enterprise ready and still being used!

So could it be used on a massive site handling 1,000 of concurrent users? Yes, IF IT WAS DESIGNED IN THE RIGHT WAY. It wouldn't be the same design as you'd use for .NET or the same as you'd use for J2EE but it would work. It might not be the best but that depends on the problem. (Same as Clusters vs Grid)

I've ranted engough ... have fun pulling my comments to peices.

The other problem with OSS is lack of innovation. How many things does the OSS community go about attempting to clone only after someone like MS or another company introduced it? Was there a FreeMware before VMware? Was there Linux PVR applications before Tivo? etc.

The presence of copying commercial software products doesn't indicate the lack of innovation.

Earlier you mentioned that Linux is missing Tax software. So, which way do you want it? Do you want someone to create something similar to TurboTax, or create something innovative? You can't have it both ways.

Aha, you say - OSS developers should write innovative tax software! Yeah, right. If somebody created software that did everything the average taxpayer needed, everyone would immediately start comparing it to TurboTax (and the other commercial offerings). In many ways the OSS program would have no choice but to "clone" the commercial programs, because there's no other logical way to do things.

There are thousands of innovative OSS programs that are incredibly innovative, that have no parallel in the commercial world. Here are a few off the top of my head:

1. Audacity - shameless plug, this is my audio editor. It's not a rip-off of CoolEdit or Sound Forge. Of course it looks similar in some superficial ways - they're all audio editors. But Audacity has dozens of innovative, unique features, like an integrated envelope editor, automatic real-time resampling when tracks are at different sample rates, three different types of sample-level editing, etc.

2. BitTorrent - robust, P2P way to speed up everyone's download speed simultaneously. And yes, it's primarily used for legitimate downloads, imagine that.

3. GAIM - aha, you say, just another instant messanger! What's innovative here is that it's the only instant messenger to support AIM, ICQ, Yahoo!, MSN, Jabber, IRC, Napster, Gadu-Gadu, Zephyr, and more...which is incredible if you have lots of friends you want to IM and they all use different systems.

4. Gallery - program that runs on your webserver that makes it fun and easy to upload pictures for everyone to see. Right from the web interface, you can categorize, show slideshows, etc.

I'm not even listing the thousands of innovative programs that OSS developers have come up with that are primarily of benefit to other developers.

Why not search the Sourceforge and Freshmeat top 100 lists for new programs? I think you'll discover lots of innovation.

Gallery is an amazingly easy to use photo-site management tool that even has a java drag-n-drop front end available (haven't actually used that yet, tho). My sister was uploading her own photos in one afternoon, and she calls IE "The Internet"

I'm more or less a linux newbie, but I found Gallery to be really easy to set up and host from my home box over my cable connection (with a bit of port forwarding... damn you port-blocking ISP bastards!). If you want to use a commercial host, the requirements for Gallery are pretty minimal. The only non-standard thing required is the netPBM image libraries. It uses a pretty slick mechanism to store serialzed data in text files, so no DB required.

If they have a Mac and you have a Gallery get them iPhotoToGallery. Makes publishing from iPhoto to Gallery a snap.

I was going to make the same recommendation. I set up gallery as a module in PostNuke. I had some problems setting it up as the start page, but it looks like the problem's been corrected in the latest CVS version. (Read more here). I must say I'm impressed with both Gallery and PostNuke, and with a bit of instruction, a non-technical person should be able to administer a website built on a combination of the two.

Check out this php-based gallery software. They used to have an entirely wiki-based doc site, but it looks like they switched to something else.

IN general, wikis are good, but you need somebody in charge of checking revision constantly and maintaining style consistency across pages. Users tend to make a mess of the wiki site.

maybe there using gallery.

I would suggest an old fashioned journal: pen and paper. Transcribe that when you get back if you like. If you're insistent on updating your friends back home, then still use pen and paper to write your journal entries. This way you can write them late at night before bed when the cafes and sights are closed anyways. Then quickly transcribe your entries during the day into your weblog. This also helps cut down on the per minute/hour cost of your cybercafe visit since you don't spend time dawdling on what to say while precious minutes and sunlight disappear.

Getting digital photos online through cybercafes can be a little more difficult. First off, buy a few large memory sticks/flashcards for your camera. This way you can continue to shoot photos until you find a cybercafe with a computer open enough to allow you to transfer your photos. Also, note that I said a FEW. Despite thinking that one massive stick/card is enough, you're better off with a few that way you can rotate through them so if you lose one (or have your camera stolen) you don't lose everything.

Most cafes that don't allow driver updates probably aren't going to let you plug in your USB device anyways. But despite what people here say even cybercafes in the larger cities (like Toronto) don't always have their computers completely locked down.

Things to prepare for photos:
1) Put the drivers online, try to pare down the file as small as you can - for each version of windows, and mac.
2) Carry the drivers for your memory reader on cd.
3) Know where the drivers are located online from the official site, the cybercafe dude might not let you install random software on the machine, but with some coercion you can probably get them to install stuff from official looking websites when you've got your camera in front of them.

One final thing to note, uploading pictures from a cybercafe can be a terror on your budget if they have a slow connection. 2 ideas to pare down upload time:
1) Leave the ftp open with a server based idle timeout.
- log on, start the upload, put the ftp client in the background and tell the cybercafe dude that you're done. hopefully he won't kill the ftp client.
- risky, someone could delete your stuff; consider an ftp account with write only, but no delete access.
- definitely don't delete your originals when trying this.
2) Burn to CD!
- Lots of cybercafes have cd burners. buy a couple blank cds and burn your pictures onto a cd so that you can clear out your memory sticks/compactflash until you find a faster connection somewhere else.

As far as photo editing software. Look into server based solutions, like Gallery for posting. And I'm sure there's some php or perl ImageMagick (server based) frontend. Or better yet, edit them when you get back.

joe.

If you want to share photos with family, I like the ceiva picture frame, because my mom doesn't have to use a computer to enjoy it. She has a very strong tremor in her hands, and so surfing the web is really not an option for her. Again, the ceiva web page makes it easy to upload photos to send to their frame.

Hey guy, don't feel down. It is a neat clean looking site and it only took me a few seconds to find a picture of your shuttle. I have some plastic cable ties laying about, from the pic I can see you might be a few short. Should I send them to you?

Thanks for leaving the Gallery link on your pages. Just what I am looking for.

While I don't disagree with the general thrust of this, there are examples of original open source programs; perhaps this would be a good place for folks to mention their favorites.

One I use a lot is called Gallery. It's a web photo gallery app written in PHP. It easy to use and has a nice feature set.

Ray

The Gallery is my definite favorite. Features and ease of installation are unbelievable.

"Gallery is a slick web based photo album written using PHP. Easy to install (it includes a config wizard), it provides users with the ability to create and maintain their own albums in the album collection via an intuitive web interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy."

But if you want more choice, have a look around and you will really be spoilt for choice.

On a side note, Slashdot is not freshmeat! Get a clue and learn how to use a search engine !

The Gallery is my definite favorite. Features and ease of installation are unbelievable. "Gallery is a slick web based photo album written using PHP. Easy to install (it includes a config wizard), it provides users with the ability to create and maintain their own albums in the album collection via an intuitive web interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy." But if you want more choice, have a look around and you will really be spoilt for choice. On a side note, Slashdot is not freshmeat! Get a clue and learn how to use a search engine !

Actually; here's a strange trend (perhaps it's just me) but every time someone wants some kind of application like photo archiving or any kind of database or mail or whatever, I immediately think and/or search for a web-based solution. Even for home stuff I install things like "Squirrel mail" and "PHP-donkey" on my main Linux box, then I can access them from anywhere with just a web browser.

Perhaps it's because I have to keep reinstalling Windows when it fscks up (Not my fault, Sue keeps installing those crappy Kewlbox games and assorted other flakeware!!) and this approach saves me from having to reconfigure mail and stuff..?

I am the system administrator for a moderatly sized private elementry school. When I started, the school had very few computing resources at it's 2 campuses. After making a list of what I wanted to accompish in 2 years, I added up the costs and found that they it would be beyod my budget to buy new workstations and build a dedicated server all based on commercial software.

Here's what I've been able to create for the school:

1 workstation for every 4 children
So when a class is in the library there is 1 student per computer. They all run win98.

I am working towards 1 laptop for each teacher
So far there is 2, they are wirelessly 802.11b connected to the network.

A dedicated Red Hat 7.2 server
Squid proxy, web page filtering and monitoring Squirrel Mail IMAP web based e-mail, samba, LDAP student/teacher contact and vital information, a MySQL powered bookmark database, Apache Web server, and a digital picture gallery.

Everything on the server is open source and works flawlessly. All of this would have cost a fortune to buy and maintain on a NT server.

I am very interested in what software other people are running if they are doing the same thing that I am. Reply to this comment or e-mail me with what you run, I'd love to share tips.