manalang

A few months ago, I installed Gallery on this server in hopes to have a decent way to publish my photos to the web. After playing with it for a day, I realized that it wasn’t a good fit for me. I have thousands of photos I’ve kept on my desktop since 1999 (the day I got my first digital camera). I never really spent much time publishing any of them on the web except for a few random shots on Yahoo! Photos — but that really doesn’t satisfy my needs either. Here’s what I want in a photo gallery:

# Easy photo publishing
# Automatically generated thumbnails
# Automatically resized photos appropriate for the web
# Easy to customize (standards based) UI
# EXIF data display

Gallery can do 2-3, but falls short on 1 and 4. It can also do 5, but not the way I’m interested in.

What I don’t want:

* To publish photo-by-photo
* To add meta-data
* To have to hook photo data into a database (too much trouble)
* To spend my days and nights customizing PHP scripts to get the UI I want
* To turn my photo gallery into a “photoblog” (I just want to be able to view them in a nice interface)

After looking around Sourceforge for a while, I found Qdig — an easy-to-use PHP script that presents image files and directories as an online gallery. Qdig is one simple PHP script that will look for images in a directory (and/or sub-directories) then process them for display as a photo gallery — all thumbnails and resized photos are then cached in a subdirectory. Qdig satisfies 1-4 in my list of “must-haves.” Although, I had to customize the script to get the EXIF data from my photos to display (very minor customization).

The best part about Qdig is its simplicity. I already backup my photos to my webserver’s backup drive. All I had to do was expose the directories containing the photos I wanted to display on my webserver then drop the PHP script in the directory. Here’s a sample gallery containing pictures of our dog Truman (don’t mind the speed… my webserver runs on a 128k DSL line… it’s not the script that’s slow). The script allows you to easily customize the gallery’s UI. The EXIF data display was also pretty easy to add. Here’s the source of my customized Qdig script (feel free to use and distribute under the same license of the vanilla Qdig). Here are the instructions for how to install it on your website.

Also, one other thing I did was implement the Qdig PHP script as an index template in Moveable Type. The big benefit here is the ability to use MT’s meta data to drive the names and descriptions of your galleries. I’m sure there could be more benefits to using MT to generate the script, but for now, that’s it.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2003 at 9:18 AM PDT and is tagged with photography, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.