Niels Horn's Blog

Creating a photo site

January 9th, 2010 by Niels Horn in Gallery

Sometimes you want to share some pictures from an event with your friends, family, etc. With modern cameras the files are simply too big to send them all by e-mail. There are several free sites available, like photobucket, flickr and picasa where I have accounts that I have used in the past.
But all have their drawbacks and did not completely satisfy me.

So I wrote my own software in PHP a while back to publish my pictures on the web, HN-Photo, that runs on my own server. It is quite crude, but does the job. Is has very basic access-control so that I can decide who can see which pictures, etc.

But recently I have been experimenting with Gallery, a free, open source package also written in PHP. It has some very nice features like:

• Tree structure of albums (Like "Work" / "Events" / "2009″ / "Party" - etc.)
• Several "Themes" to choose from, that can afterwards be adapted to your own liking
• Automatic scaling to several sizes - from fast showing 640×480 to the maximum that was uploaded (10Mpixels in my case)
• Several ways to upload pictures, from single pictures to bulk-upload, rsync, etc.
• Functions to move pictures between albums, rename, create tags, etc.
• Impressive permissions structure, with groups and users per album, etc.
• Lots of plugins available, including e-commerce
• Integration with many programs, including WordPress

There are many things I'm still discovering and experimenting with, but it seems I will be migrating my >20GB collection in the near future. I will have to try out that bulk-upload feature…