January 04, 2004

Photo Gallery

So I'm using "Gallery" as my photo gallery. But it has some stupid limitations so I can't import my nicely organized photos. And I've finally organized them all; there's lots of new photos (Honduras 2002, last summer, recent trip to Cancun, floormates & dorm friends, etc) but I've no easy way to get them into Gallery.

So here's my choices: put a few select albums into my existing photo gallery; revert to an old and sorta ugly photo browsing system, but with all my new pics; wait a few months until I write a good photo browsing system that works the way I want it.

So what do you want? A useful gallery, an up-to-date gallery, or both in several months? Let me know!

Posted by Dave at January 4, 2004 12:00 AM | TrackBack
Comments

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?

Posted by: Andy at January 4, 2004 10:36 PM

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)

Posted by: Dave at January 4, 2004 11:03 PM