Dave's Blog

What features does it lack? There's a decent Java app floating around for adding comments and uploading. I've used that for a while. I can't remember the name, but when I get back to GR, I could send it along. Interested?

Well I have all my photos hierarchically organized into albums & subalbums, and each file is named with the photo's caption. I want to be able to upload (rsync, ideally) the files to the webserver and import them all at once, getting photo descriptions and album names from the files and directories. Gallery internally stores subalbums as peers, not children and it's mass-input wizard only does one album at a time. Moreover, I want to make small changes and run a wizard that'll find new & changed photos and update the photo gallery automatically (following the procedure used for importing). And finally I want all this to be dynamic so I can sort or search by arbitrary attributes of a photo (not just description keywords). Example: date photo was taken (extracted from the EXIF data embedded in the JPEG).

I think I will write (yet another programming project, yay!) a image-browsing interface that is *completely* abstracted away from the source data. Of course I'll have to write an implementation of the data retrieval that fits what I want. The point of doing it like this is that the browsing interface can be used by FamilySite (http://familysite.sf.net/) for it's photo gallery which has a very different internal structure (e.g., "categories" are dynamically determined by family relationships)