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I am facing the same problem and plan to use a web-application (such as gallery). Not out of exhibitionism, but to allow the older relatives to help with tagging, sorting, commenting, and rating the images — while themselves enjoying the pictures of their descendants doing fun things.

I will block anonymous access to the collection by default, but will still be able to open it for the particular images I may choose to share.

Gallery in particular can "import" the existing photos on the hosting computer in bulk — you don't need to upload them via browser one at a time.

Gallery 3

I do understand all to well what you asking for, and you'd think that it would be a fairly commonly found need, but apparently it's slim to none of anyone creating an all-in-one media manager. I too have a pretty large media collection consisting over about 1.5 TB of video, 80 GB of music, 30 GB of pictures, 28 GB of books, and other misc media. How to keep any sanity with it all has proven to be tasking.

While I'd love to know if you do find a good solution for it all, maybe some of the better solutions I've found will help you out or point you in the right direction. All of the following are open source Linux solutions that are pretty commonly found. I use Gallery to manage all my photos and even my self shot video, which is a pretty powerful and easy to install web based system. Couldn't really ask much more for organizing, managing, and making your collection available from anywhere - but still protected if so desired.

For my movie collection the best thing I found was Griffith, which is far from perfect or ideal, but is still young and they are making great strides with it's development. You can use one of a pretty long list of sources, which automatically grabs the majority of any movie details, downloads the poster and whatnot, but more importantly makes the information cross-reference friendly. So you can search for movies by director, or actor, or key grip if you want. Nice too that it imports and exports, although not in an ideal format.

The finally for music I kind of jump around between Clementine, Banshee, and Rhythmbox. All three are excellent players that handle a wide range of searching and playing ease, as well as recommending similar styles, genre, downloading covers and lyrics, etc. One key thing I absolutely have to have it mapping to my "extra" keys, which all three do. The Erognomic 4000 keyboard by Microsoft is about the only thing I've really liked that came from Microsoft, and I love it - even though way over priced. LOL

Oh if there were only a way to smash these together. Maybe if I find some spare time I'll start on a project doing just that, although "extra" time is tricky to come by these days...months... well last few years. *sigh*

Shouldn't Wikimedia accept WebM as well then?

According to the Commons:Video page, "WebM support will likely be added in the future. See this bug report for its current status."

The bug report described is #23888, and was last updated on 2010-08-24 -- over 5 months ago. It appears that there needs to just be some hacking done on MediaWiki to support it.

I think that this bug report is a perfect example of what needs to be done to give WebM the traction to take the upper hand in web video. Do you want support for WebM video in Gallery2 or Gallery3? Do you want support for WebM video in MediaWiki? How about Drupal, Plone, or Joomla? Or how about just plain-old mime-type support for WebM in Ubuntu?

Yes, there are projects underway to support WebM in these FOSS projects, but nearly all of them aren't ready for daily use yet. If we want to see WebM deployed as the video format of choice for the web, we really need to step up and make sure that WebM is as supported as a video format as PNG and JPEG are supported as image formats.

1. Get Website
2. Install http://gallery.menalto.com/
3. Store Photos.
4. ????
5. Profit!

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..

I just use Gnome's filesystem manager called nautilus, it supports tagging and commenting filesystem files. Filenames and tags are then indexed by "tracker" which has a multitude of client interfaces and applets for searching the indexed data. I always find my fotos easily by this way.

The fotos are stored in a organized collection which the only backends are the regular filesystem and gvfs. On my collection's toplevel directory I put every event prefixed by its date:
20100105_Birthday.of.xxxx
20100120_Going.to.Ski.with.Pedro.Ana
etc..

Filesystem's features like softlinks, hardlinks allows me to keep redundancy down and the album organized. Gvfs features like tagging, commenting, setting icons and emblems do the rest. The tracker is only used for searching fotos.

Since I don't use facebook or anything similar, I have Gallery http://gallery.menalto.com/ installed on a private server. It is really great! You should try.

Those of you who hate Flash on the internet and are good with HTML5 and JavaScript really need to head on over and help out the team working on Gallery:

http://gallery.menalto.com/

For the second time now, they've given up trying to do things "right" using Javascript and are throwing in the towel to implement core functionality using Flash instead:

http://gallery.menalto.com/thanks_adobe_flash_builder

They claim they just don't have the skills or manpower to figure out how to make Javascript do what they want, so they're just using Flash since it's easier. I'm not the only Gallery user to have grave concerns about this trend.

Those of you who hate Flash on the internet and are good with HTML5 and JavaScript really need to head on over and help out the team working on Gallery:

http://gallery.menalto.com/

For the second time now, they've given up trying to do things "right" using Javascript and are throwing in the towel to implement core functionality using Flash instead:

http://gallery.menalto.com/thanks_adobe_flash_builder

They claim they just don't have the skills or manpower to figure out how to make Javascript do what they want, so they're just using Flash since it's easier. I'm not the only Gallery user to have grave concerns about this trend.

exactly. how do you even "manage" images with gimp ?
one of the best choices seems to be digikam - especially with the gallery export

Wolfdale E7500, G31 mobo (Gigabyte), 1TB green WD HDD, single 1 GB stick, 80+ PSU.
  I have used this article as a guideline.
The Wolfdale is very low-power in idle state but delivers oomph when you need it (e.g. HD streaming to HTPC or video-recoding or re-sizing thumbnails in my Gallery).
SUSE/Apache for few years, then when auto-updates broke the system few times in a row, WHS/IIS6.

Firstly, it's my fault for running a webmail client I got from browsing through apt-cache, installed with apt-get and configured mostly with dpkg-reconfigure instead of grabbing the official current build and reading the readme and man pages and faq, and doing this on a somewhat important machine. Did the same thing with Gallery and PHPNuke several years ago. Even webmin in my reckless and stupid experimental days. That's painting a target on yourself to get malware on your sites and start running irc bots or worse. Have you looked at some of these rootkit sites? Disturbing how finding and proliferating vulnerabilities in Linux, not just MS, is a full-time hobby/living for so many people. Then you install something like snort from apt-get thinking Yeah I'm on top of my security now, but you have no idea that you're using a six month old release of software with a demo package of ancient rules when it needs heavy configuration that dpkg doesn't handle and fresh rules with a subscription and a key in the right place to be effective.

That said, yeah, Debian's reputation for waiting a ... conservative amount of time to make new releases of various software available on their repositories, whether it's gimp or gaim or kde or nmap, maybe I assumed that that behavior of deliberately (?) waiting a little while longer than the rest of the world to catch up to the developers' latest releases for the sake of not releasing anything that may contribute to snafus, that Debian's actually doing what's best for me. Maybe my roundcube adventure was anomalous. Regardless, I love Debian, I certainly love apt (so much I just tried Debian KFreeBSD to hang onto apt). By naming the package management systems of the other distros/OSs I was trying to suggest another point that Linux is becoming too easy. Lower learning curve, more people who may make my mistake and surrender their machines to China, Russia and 4chan by installing the wrong package.

It would be great if apt had svn/cvs behavior embedded into it to somehow investigate whether or not everything on your system is up to date by logging not just onto Debian's repositories but to servers maintained by developers. Can't expect apt to then install the next version but just to let me know what it found so I could deal with it myself. Maybe such a thing already exists -- guess I should apt-cache search it. :P

Your solution would almost be workable, if I could stomach using a Windows-based device.

Agreed. I honestly thought that something as embedded as a picture frame should just work, but apparently using Windows CE and cheap developers leads to a crap product. The one on ThinkGeek should be better, but I haven't used it. It appeared a little while after I started having problems with the Samsung, and I really wish I had gotten that.

I assume I could setup an "RSS feed/server" (I dont know crap about RSS, I'd have to learn) on my *own* hardware so as to avoid using outside servers.

You could. RSS as used for pictures is essentially a list of pictures, and the picture frame I have now only shows pictures in that list, so if they get removed from the feed, they are removed from the frame. I just point the frame to a url, and that could easily be on your own system, like http://10.0.1.123/pictures.rss , no problem. You could install Gallery on your computer, and use that to generate the RSS feeds. That would give you an easy interface, privacy, and a ready-built RSS generator.

My key objection to any frames with wifi that I've seen so far is that they all want you to subscribe to service from some outside website.

Mine too, but I ignore that feature. Check to see if that is optional, and if it can get a feed from any url.

The second one you refer to is rather pricey, especially since I already have a frame. I'd really like to find a way to connect wifi-accessible storage to the one I already have.

They are embedded systems, so it isn't easy to upgrade them, especially to do stuff they don't have the hardware to support. If files just appeared on a SD (say from you pushing data on to a Eye-Fi), would any of the data in cached in ram about the filesystem lead to corruption? If you had to turn the system off when updating the files, would the SD card have the power?

And this is why I have my own installation of Gallery2 on my own servers and I control access to the pictures. I like to retain the pictures in my control and not grant a license to any corporation to take my photos and use them in any way they feel. Sure, I get a lot of people I know bitching at me about the fact that they have to log in to my gallery site, because it's just not as easy as logging into facebook (really? sounds like they just had to do the same thing...). But no amount of complaining from them will get me to give in and put up my collection on facebook...

...was in the "Two-thirds simply don't want it. The bigger issue is a lack of perceived value" camp until he started receiving many rather large pictures and short home movies (usually taken from a digital camera) of his grand kids. He was also attempting to upload pictures he'd taken to the family Gallery (it runs Gallery), but it took so long to do (he has a 7+ MP camera, so the pictures were rather large). After finally biting the bullet and getting *the cheapest* "broadband" he could find (I think it was 128k down / 64k up), within a couple weeks he had upgraded to a mid-level broadband package (somewhere around 1.5mb down/256(or more) up) and was finding himself doing so much more with it. I personally believe the final straw that made him actually upgrade his package was the ability to see/talk to his middle son (one of my two younger brothers) while he was/is deployed in Iraq (on his third tour now, I believe).

There are some people that just aren't going to want it, no matter what you show them can be done with it, but I think a large percentage of those 2/3 that "don't perceive the value" simply haven't had anyone explain/show them what value they could be getting.

That's a ridiculously good point. Applications like Gallery 2 have remote applications that I'm sure can be tuned to your disconnected-mode needs. Simply get everything ready to upload before you login, then when you're online all the human slowness will be taken out of the equation.

55.5 seconds per day doesn't seem like a lot, but if their internet connection is worth their (sea) salt even a 1mbit satellite link is almost 7 megabytes of data per day... assuming everyone else isn't doing the same thing at the same time of course.

If you're really interested in the process, check out Message Queuing. The idea is asynchronous communication between client/server so that you can do stuff when disconnected from the network, and saving your precious "almost" minute per day :)

-Matt

I can confirm this. A few years ago I took an old P3 900MHz computer and built it into a server running FreeBSD 5.1. I mainly use it to store files and host a picture gallery on Gallery. Occasionally I have it run Firefox via Xming on my work computer when I want to check a potentially NSFW or malware ridden website.

Over the years I have upgraded FreeBSD to the current RELEASE builds and updated the other software. With each new major build of FreeBSD I have seen a performance increase. I wouldn't say it was a drastic change every upgrade, but there have been noticeable improvements.

IMHO it is quite possible for Microsoft to write a new version of their OS and not add significant bloat. Sadly their mentality is to not worry about bloat since they expect the hardware to compensate. I agree that the hardware exists to run Vista nicely, there's just a premium for it. For what I need my laptop to do, I can do nicely with XP. To do it with Vista I'll need more RAM which comes out to buying two expensive sticks of 4GB SODIMMs.

The only sure way to avoid this is to run your own. Gallery2 does pretty much what flikr does (and is open source). You'll need a web server that can run php and some kind of database.

G2 has a keywords module that sounds a lot like what you want to do. If not, there's the tags module. If you want Gallery to look more like Flickr, just theme it.

I use Gallery v2 for my family, it is really good for home use on a small server or whatever. It has resizing (via ImageMagick) and a really nice Java based slideshow

See http://gallery.menalto.com/

For Business use I would perhaps use something else as it looks far too much fun!

Yeah, but he's talking about mysql, not pg. Use my solution : http://gallery.menalto.com/node/61073#comment-2238 08

The Gallery Project hasn't yet seen a big interest in the 2007 Summer of Code. We'd like to encourage all interested students to apply before the deadline. Please don't wait until the last minute!

Students should feel free to submit their own project idea. In fact, we strongly suggest you submit your own project idea and have updated our ideas page to reflect this. You don't have to start from scratch - our "Create your own idea!" section has links to several areas with possible ideas. The Sample Ideas on our ideas page are just examples - they're not necessarily a higher priority than any other feature request.

We'd also like to encourage you to apply for multiple projects. We've seen several applications for the same project and we can only select one student for each project.

If you have any questions, feel free to talk to us on our Summer of Code mailing list or in #gallery on irc.freenode.net

Good luck!

--
Michael Schultheiss
Gallery Summer of Code Program Administration Team

I can buy a used device

take the time to modify it myself

and come up with a box that doesn't include a remote, support, or warranty

doesn't sync with or stream from iTunes

doesn't sync my photo library

doesn't have wireless

is about five hundred times larger

has 1/5th the capacity

doesn't actually support playing back HD video

Personally, I gave up using X photo organization software, because there was always a better one around the corner and making the switch was a pain in the **s. Now I'm uploading all my photos to Gallery2 php/sql -web application. It has more features then I need, is developed actively and it is a handy way to share photos to people or use it as a backend for website image storage. You can also limit the access to photos with powerful account based permission system.

If you have photos with GPS coordinates (e.g. in the EXIF data), you can use Gallery + its map module to easily generate a photo album with maps.
An example: http://gallery.ibao.net/ (click on the map on the left)

References:
http://gallery.menalto.com/
http://codex.gallery2.org/index.php/Gallery2:Modul es:Map
http://codex.gallery2.org/index.php/Gallery2:Modul es:Map:UserGuide

And don't forget to mention Gallery Remote, which is a handy little applet, which allows users to upload and manage images with ease.

Further, you can then extend you site with other features and functions, by integrating Gallery into a CMS, such as Joomla.

And don't forget to mention Gallery Remote, which is a handy little applet, which allows users to upload and manage images with ease.

Further, you can then extend you site with other features and functions, by integrating Gallery into a CMS, such as Joomla.

I use a gallery2 on my server. Check it out here : http://gallery.menalto.com/

I've been pretty pleased with it. Add in a wiki for letting other family members post miscellaneous stories and whatnot. I found it easy to setup, and it does everything I need.

Gallery2 is nice, albeit a bit resource intensive when scaling down pictures to thumbnails using the 'convert' app.

The more the logic is separated from the code, the better.

I am an artist/designer with a bit of programming skill. I used to use Gallery as the backend for my site. Gallery 1.x spits out horrible, ugly table-based HTML. And this HTML is intimately entwined with its PHP code. I browbeat it into making reasonably clean HTML that I could style. It took a hell of a long time, because I had to dissect and understand a lot of its PHP code. I pretty much got a working knowledge of PHP doing this.

Then updates happened. I'd had to so extensively modify Gallery that merging my design with the updates was a bigger task than doing them from scratch was. And the 2.x strain of it, while it has a templating system, has a terrible case of second-system effect - it's huge.

I switched to Singapore. It was close to being my original choice, but it lacked a couple of features it's since added. I was able to exactly duplicate my design in a couple of days, because its templates are firmly separated from its logic. It would have taken even less time, but I took the opportunity to clean up my code a little.

Singapore just updated. I haven't updated my installation yet, but it's a task that actually seems possible.

I've never used Flickr, but I have been using Gallery now for about 6 months. 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 image organization programs and services I've used (and there's a whole lotta them!), 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 no, it's not pr0n. ;-)

I suppose I could use the Flickr API, but I just wanted something I could stick on my own private site. If something bad happened with Flickr it would be far too much of a hassle to have to deal with someone else's system.

Keep in mind, though, two things. First, Google Maps is the exception to the rule in terms of the tradeoff between usefulness and complexity (in the sense of lacking a reasonable degradability for browsers without the necessary functionality). Second, imagine how much better Google Maps would be if it didn't have to be crammed into a browser.

I have a stack of old boxen in my office doing reliable duty as (respectively) a NAT router / packet filter, an SMTP server, DNS server, SMTP server and SMB fileserver. They are all running OpenBSD except the fileserver which runs FreeBSD (because my SATA RAID controller shipped with a driver for FreeBSD). They all perform excellently, although Gallery is a bit slow on the webserver when doing things like resizing photos. The "fastest" one of the bunch is a Pentium II with 64 Mb RAM.

Iview MediaPro has been recommended to me. It's smart about offline files, supports all sorts of tagging and searching, and isn't scared of terabyte-scale archives.

That being said, Gallery 2 has most of the same capabilities. It's a web photo sharing package, but you don't need to give the whole internet access to it. Gallery 2 is quite a powerful database, and if you're smart about tagging things as you add them, the search functions are impressive.

I can't justify having a printer just for digital photos, especially considering
1) I can order prints online, either within iPhoto or from another service
2) I have a gallery that I can host images on and share with friends and family
3) I can go print out a photo at any number of locations using their printer, if I really, desperately need a representative of my image in petrochemicals on dead trees
4) Ink cartridges for the damn things are more expensive than the printer itself, are dried out before I use them, and don't preserve well (though this is improving) 5) They only print photos 6) Storing photos on a hard drive takes up as much space as, well, a hard drive. Try keeping 10,000 dead-tree photos (as many as I have in my iPhoto library right now) indexed and searchable, not to mention preserved.

Microsoft Word is the "type manager" of doc files

No, Word is the "editor" of doc files, you see the difference? Windows Explorer is the current "type manager" of .doc files.

It's not about the type of data being managed it's about ease of which you can share that data with other people

Good job, you saw the word "iTunes" and thought he was talking about music. In the article, the author concludes with further examples of what he's talking about, such as Valve's Steam (game manager), many MAME frontends (ROM manager), as well as others.

Yes, people love to share, but that's not the same thing as managing. I want to have all of my music categorized and tagged. I want all of my photos organized with captions and tags. I want all of my email properly filed and readily accessible. There is no way a file manager can properly manage all of those different file types (not even you, Emacs). Thus, the author seems to be suggesting that specialized file managers, each appropriate to the types of data it's designed for, are a better management interface than a simple file manager with applications to edit individual files.

As for your statements about sharing, I would argue that sharing is an example of exporting. Exporting, meanwhile, is something that happens in a management interface. I can export my songs to an audio, MP3, or data CD; my photos can be exported to CD, to Gallery, to Flickr, etc. I wouldn't want my file manager to handle all of those possible export options; it would be a mess (I'm looking at you, Konqueror).

It is about the data, stupid.

Maybe im getting to old, but I think that You have to be more than a nerd to read a site that is shown like this: (I'm using Firefox to browse http://gallery.menalto.com/)

@import "misc/drupaTxxhtmla//tyle > .ricp-search-form input.form-submit {marginF noo o0 1em;} .ricp-search-more-link { fnte-weight: bold; fnte-tyle :italic;} .ricp-search-excerpt {fnte-weight: bold;} //tyle >

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/index.php:39) in /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/includes/sess ion.inc on line 10 Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/index.php:39) in /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/includes/sess ion.inc on line 10 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/index.php:39) in /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/includes/boot strap.inc on line 448

Plus half a page of unreadable junk which I won't even try to get past the lameness filter.

I think I'll wait for Gallery 3.x

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/index.php:39) in /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/includes/sess ion.inc on line 10 Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cache limiter - headers already sent (output started at /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/index.php:39) in /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/includes/sess ion.inc on line 10 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/index.php:39) in /usr/www/website/drupal.gallery2.org/includes/boot strap.inc on line 448

Plus half a page of unreadable junk which I won't even try to get past the lameness filter.

I think I'll wait for Gallery 3.x

Database (Gallery 2 only) - MySQL 3.x or 4.x, PostgreSQL 7.x, Oracle 9i or 10g (Gallery 1.x does NOT require a database)

You don't need a perl replacement for Gallery.
Choose G2 (Gallery 2), you will notice that it's a whole new application. It has no code in common with Gallery 1. And all inputs are checked thorougly.
It's the cleanest PHP code I've ever seen. No spaghetti code. See: G2 Development Guidelines. (G2 is almost finished, it's in its last beta cycle)

The Gallery project has a list of ideas for Google Summer of Code coders. This is a very nice, mature, PHP application used for managing pictures online.

Another great project that would be interesting to work with is Jinzora. Jinzora is a web-based music streaming/archiving application. It may be one of the best around.

Both applications are GPLed, fairly mature, actively developed and used, and are just plain useful tools to use.

The Gallery project has a list of ideas for Google Summer of Code coders. This is a very nice, mature, PHP application used for managing pictures online.

Another great project that would be interesting to work with is Jinzora. Jinzora is a web-based music streaming/archiving application. It may be one of the best around.

Both applications are GPLed, fairly mature, actively developed and used, and are just plain useful tools to use.

"stuff like Gallery and SpamAssassin which I don't consider critical for security updates."

Um. Perhaps you should.

Any internet facing aplication should be conisdered critical when it comes to security updates.

In the meantime, there's a plugin that allows easy posting of Gallery image to a WP blog -- WP-Gallery:
http://geoffhutchison.net/blog/categories/wp-plugi ns/

There's also Gallery-RSS for keeping track of recent updates to your Gallery:
http://www.smartbrother.org/archives/2004/12/31/ga llery_rss-announce/

Try Gallery :o)
http://gallery.menalto.com/ [gallery.menalto.com].

Tired of paying someone to host your photo gallery? Try http://gallery.menalto.com/ -- if your server can handle it.

Why in the heck would you want to print a digital picture? I thought the point of digital photography was that you could share it without killing trees. Get Gallery.

And I'd much rather have everything be Bluetooth enabled and network than carry one huge thing around. Convergence isn't nearly as efficient or effective as connectibility.

And I have a Gallery so my family from all over the country can see photos any day or night.

Quite a while ago I was going to start a scanning project of scanning all my family's photos, slides and negatives in so they could be preserved. I ended up buying the HP PhotoSmart S20 and it's been great. The nice thing is that it adjusts to different negative sizes, slides, and even 5X7 prints. Scanning speed is reasonable, and the results are very good. After about 6 months my brother and I have scanned in almost all the old photos and now they're easily indexed and found on a Gallery Photo Server.

I'm not sure that HP makes this model any more, but maybe something out there will be as useful as it has been. Over 10,000 scans and more to go!