FEATURES IN AN ALBUM GENERATOR

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

I am trying to install coppermine photo gallery software in my website, but haven’t been able to do it in last couple of days due to some technical hitch in uploading it. So in the meanwhile, let me rant a bit about what am I looking up to in a gallery software. Some of these features are not available in coppermine and it will be great if someone can suggest anything better. Here is the list.

1. Images must be stored in a database. This provides a lot of flexibility in generating the galleries(coppermine supports this).
2. The web pages must be statically rendered. That is, I should be able to generate the thumbnails and images of all sizes and the html pages and store it in the file system. I should be able to generate or re-generate these files by click of a button. This is similar to what you get in Blogger. Data will be in the database but files are generated and exported using this data. The database itself is not needed at the time of viewing the files. This enables fast rendering and reduces the dependency on database. This also means I can install, create and store the gallery information and database in my home computer and export only the generated files to the web server(coppermine does not support).
3. Must permit changing an album to add/remove images(coppermine supports this).
4. Must allow me to change template at will(coppermine supports this).
5. Must be an integrated, easy to install software. Coppermine is pretty clumsy in this regard. You need a whole lot of applications for coppermine to work, which includes imagemagik, php and mysql.
6. A stand alone software is better. This is like a continuation to feature 2. Coppermine requires a web browser to run it.
7. Other frills like commenting, rating the images, emailing the image and such interactive features would be nice and should be administrable. But I can do without them.
8. Must allow configuring image sizes for thumbnails and other sizes

I am pretty much fine with coppermine except for feature 2. I would prefer a software that allows me to generate the pages and images at my home computer and export it to the web server host(An in built ftp client that can only export the diff each time I edit the Album will be really nice). I would not mind foregoing features like commenting and rating the image for this.

I am beginning to feel that blogging and any such online activity will be much easier if you have control over the software you use. Am thinking of learning the relevent technologies so that I can change open source software like coppermine photo gallery to suit my purpose, but time has to permit this.