Zope Photo Installer and Photo Galleries

A Photoalbum product for Zope. It doesn’t seem to be plone-friendly yet. Check out this feature list. It looks like the yet-to-be-released version 1.4 will make it plone-friendly.

Alex King has a photo database. The neat thing about his product is that it is platform neutral. Basically you run a web server on your local machine to let you create your catalog database. Because it runs on php/mysql/apache, you can run it on any machine (and because it is in mysql, I assume you can manipulate your data for reports. The only bad thing about this software is that it doesn’t offer a way to display your data and that for performance reasons it’s not good for a remote server. Still, if you can import the photos to a directory which can then by used by another display program, it would work very well. (Alex King has a forum here for his product). For those who can afford to stay on Windows only, there are two good options: Picasa (recently bought by google) and imatch.

WordPress has a photo hack, which really isn’t necessary because you can upload several photos in any given post, for example.

Of course, there’s the PHP-based Gallery project (though I don’t feel comfortable with the fact that the PHP must not be in safe mode.

I have two problems (really three) to address. First, which gallery is the most user-friendly and most compatible for my preferred platform (zope/plone)? Second, how easy will it be to customize the output so that I can make (sometimes lengthy) comments about the photos in question? (I’m guessing that can be done with ZPT). Third, can I batch upload the photos via SCP/FTP or even multiple upload controls on a webpage? Fourth, I want the ability to create metadata for the photos I am importing into the project. (And I want a way to access and even use this metadata outside of the web interface). Fifth, I want the ability to specify parameters about the size of thumbnails and maximum size of uploads (and screen size). Sixth, I want an easy way to access the files on the file system in the event that the web interface has broken down. Seventh, I would like the ability to allow different users to create their own photo galleries, with appropriate permissions and controls. Also, the big question is photo metadata. There is IPCT (which relates to content, using general categories), and EXIF (which relates to technical specs of the camera and shooting). Here’s a primary on photo metadata.

Zope uses CMFPhotoAlbum, which I think is sucky (though its Python Image library allows you to zoom, which is cool . Anybody have a better suggestion?


Posted

in

, ,

by

Tags:

Comments

One response to “Zope Photo Installer and Photo Galleries”

  1. Priyadarshan Avatar

    We had a similar problem in choosing a Gallery software for Sri Chinmoy Races, which is based on Plone.

    For now, we are using Gallery 1.4, but we are waiting for the next version, Gallery 2.

    It would be great to have a Plone based Gallery software, but none looks as good until now.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.