What LAMP-Based Gallery Software Would You Use?

Zanguinar asks: "I've been a Gallery user for years now. I have a ton of photos, organized by albums, mainly just for use by my family and close friends. However, some of my friends have begun using Flickr. I can't say I blame them, since it's got a great design, and I love the tagging concept. However, I'm not eager to store my photos on somebody else's server, and don't want to pay for the privilege, especially since I already run my own web server. The problem is, I can't find any Flickr-like software to run on my home LAMP setup. All I want is to be able to tag my photos like Flickr and be able to display them by tag, tag intersection, date, and other such fields. Is there an OSS that is doing this?"

danbooru

danbooru [donmai.us] it's ruby on rails, and kind of a pain to setup, but it's quite nice once it's running.

JuxtaPhoto

http://jeffreyharrell.com/projects/juxtaphoto/ [jeffreyharrell.com]

JuxtaPhoto

JuxtaPhoto is an easy PHP photo album that lets you share and organize images on your website. The features include tagged "smart albums", EXIF information, batch uploads, automatic photo sizing, chronological sorting of photos, slideshows, and easy to modify templates.

Demo:
http://photos.jeffreyharrell.com/ [jeffreyharrell.com]

Gallery

I use Gallery v2 for my family, it is really good for home use on a small server or whatever. It has resizing (via ImageMagick) and a really nice Java based slideshow

See http://gallery.menalto.com/ [menalto.com]

For Business use I would perhaps use something else as it looks far too much fun!

Gallery 2.

G2 has a keywords module that sounds a lot like what you want to do. If not, there's the tags module [menalto.com]. If you want Gallery to look more like Flickr, just theme it [thelineberrys.com].

blorp!

http://www.1014.org/code/blorpscript/ [1014.org]

One of Justin Frankel's (from Winamp) works. Not as structured as Flikr, but is also more flexible.

Singapore? Coppermine?

Singapore or Coppermine?

http://www.sgal.org/ [sgal.org]

http://coppermine-gallery.net/ [coppermine-gallery.net]

I use Gallery

and it is nice software but I find that after you get thousands of images it gets rather difficult to manage. I would love to have an application that lets me tag pictures on my home computer like in an explorer window and keep it in sync with the server.

I think that would be so much easier to manage. Its a project on my to do list and really all you need to do is write a client to talk to a gallery server.

Like you, I have my own server and i'd rather host it... Especially since I already have 12GB of images uploaded.

I've officially aged out of the nerd category.

I read the original post, and the replies.

Other than the word "the", I don't think I have any idea what anybody is talking about. :-)

Roll your own

More like WAPP and not exactly LAMP, but I wrote my own gallery in Perl. Runs on Win2003, Apache, PostgreSQL, and Perl 5.8.8, but should work fine on BSD or, if you must, Linux.

The first version just made the thumbnails with ImageMagick for images in specified folders and spewed out a table with the thumbnails and links. It didn't even use the database. Now you add an album through an admin page and at this point the script adds the album and individual images to the DB, then it makes the thumbnails with PerlMagick. The user accessible part just fetches the rows and prints them out in individual divs, which are then nicely arranged in CSS. Ta-da!

The whole thing is less than 200 lines including a good deal of comments (or maybe just commented-out code). Had fun writing it, would do it again. A+++.

Zenphoto

Shameless plug... I wrote it. :-) Simple and sweet, directory-based, fast and secure.

http://www.zenphoto.org/ [zenphoto.org]

There's always Photo Organizer..

http://po.shaftnet.org/ [shaftnet.org]

It's primary purpose is to be a photographer's main image repository rather than "post a bunch of images online and blog about it" As such, it lacks social networking features (beyond ratings) but it scales up to ginormous repository sizes. My personal site has over 30K images (in over 100GB).

It supports multiple image versions, extensive tagging, bulk updates, and has fancy search, import, and export features. It's built on top of PostgreSQL, making extensive use of stored procedures and triggers, not to mention the usual ACID features.

This is a shameless self-plug though -- I stumbled across PO a couple of years ago and ended up contributing so much back that the original author handed the reigns to me. I have a huge laundry list of features to add, mostly driven by real-world needs.

photolibrary

photolibrary [sourceforge.net] is an interesting alternative...

Scry

This suggestion does not meet the needs for the question submitter, but I'd like to clue in other slashdot readers who might be reading this.

Scry [scry.org] is a great, simple, easy-to-install PHP image gallery. Just download it, unpack it, and upload your photos, organized in folders, to the 'photos' directory. The first time you view the site, Scry will create thumbnails and index images.

It requires write permissions on the server ( to create the thumbnails and index images) and it relies on GD support being compiled in to PHP. It does not have the tagging capabilities that the questioner is looking for, so it's not a solution in that sense. It doesn't require MySQL or any other database. So if you want to put up a photo gallery only by manipulating the file system, Scry is great.

Try LinPHA...

LinPHA [sourceforge.net] does a fair bit of what you are looking for, and is fairly easy to set up. It doesn't have tagging, but it's categories are a functional equivalent. I use it for my photos on my own server.

DRIV

It does a sufficient job: DRIV [ikea.com]

My own :)

I had much the same problem, which I attempted to solve with danbooru; after 4 hours of banging my head against ruby on rails and postgres, I decided that there needed to be something which was much like danbooru but a lot easier to set up. Being unable to find such a thing, I made one for myself, and the result is here [shishnet.org]. (tech info / downloads / etc [shishnet.org])

Plogger

Plogger [plogger.org]
* Easy Install and Setup -- Single step installation - no fussing with configuration files or server privileges (if allowed). Plogger contains a fully featured, secure administration system. Plogger can be used as a stand-alone gallery or be dropped into your current site with no more than three PHP statements. You can be up and running in less than five minutes.
* Easy Gallery Creation -- You can upload photos one at a time from the web based administrative tool or use an FTP connection to import your photos in groups. Plogger has two levels of organization, allowing you to organize your images efficiently and easily.
* Automatic Thumbnail Generation -- Supports server side caching and high-quality true-color resampling. Thumbnails can be configured to be any size you choose from the options menu. Supports all major image formats (JPG, BMP, PNG, GIF).
* XHTML W3C Compliant -- Plogger outputs properly formatted, fully validated XHTML. This allows the user to configure the look of Plogger via the included style sheet. Your site will remain validated and accessible.
* User Feedback -- Plogger allows you to turn comments on or off for any specified image. Comments are displayed publicly and add an element of community to your gallery.
* RSS support -- Each level of organization can now generate it's own RSS feed. You can subscribe to feeds for a single album, collection, or the entire gallery. Additionally, you can subscribe to a custom set of search terms to keep you updated on your chosen keywords.
* Integrated JavaScript Slideshow -- Any of your albums can be instantly viewed as a hands-free JavaScript slideshow.

roll your own

I did my own. Been working on it and upgrading it for about 7 years now. Actually I started it as a plugin to Slashcode. Working on that project has ben my way to keep up with stuff. I moved from using Slashcode's DB accessors to Class::DBI, then I decided to ditch slashcode entirely and use Catalyst, then I ditched Class::DBI in favor of DBIx::Class. I have javascript/JSON/AJAX (is AJAJ a real term yet?) interface. We (my wife and I) use it to organize photos and build a static public site. Gallery and the like annoy me because so many pictures suck and people take no time at all to cull the bad ones. So my system is all inward facing, and we pick the good ones (good being subjective, of course) and assemble a static site with words and images, etc. Static is really easy on the server when hit by grandparents and aunts and uncles.

I've played with Image::Magick mostly to do the image manipulation. I looked at GD, but it wasn't feature-full enough. At one time I had lots of interface stuff for Image::Magick routines, like brightness and contrast, etc etc, but even I wasn't using them, so I deleted them. At the moment I have a nifty ajax thing for area of interest, and rotation, and that's pretty much it, but a hold over from the complicated filter days is that I have a crazy pipeline of eval'ed perl stored in the database representing a transform to apply to an image, so that when it is rotated, colored, brightened, or whatever, the transform is applied to the original image, rather than obliterating the original. And in doing that I learned that sometimes a join table in a database has to be three way, or you can get big problems. So I've got a threeway join table, linking the imageid, blobid, and transformid. And I have a small clue about database normalization.

And taking a cue from Slashcode (right before I ditched the code) I bought the argument that it was a good idea to stick images directly in the database. So that's where they are, blobs in the the database. Now I regret that as my images have grown to 2-3 MB rather than about 200K when I started out. Apparently you can play tricks with the server to just memcopy an image from a filesystem to the browser, but not if the image is stuffed in a database.

blah blah blah. I know lots about this stuff, and about perl and apache and mysql and postgresql and ajax and so on that I never would have learned had I not "rolled my own" Why just last weekend I learned about perlcritic and perltidy, and realized how far my usual idioms are from those recommended by Damian Conway. So now I am on a perldoc diet until perlcritic stops whining at me.

Why not Flickr?

Seems like you're already using most people's favorite LAMP based gallery software - I'd take another look at flickr.

I resisted it for a long time, and just uploaded all my photos to it, and am glad to have them all off my server. flickr's easy to use for me - and more importantly - my family and friends. no training, no maintenance, unlimited space, upload via email + phone - all worth 25/yr to me. (cheaper than research and setup time for the software, or the hard drive I was going to have to buy to store the pictures)

The only downside is the 'not my server' argument. In terms of privacy and backup, I trust their maintenance and organization over my home server. Cal Henderson knows more about that stuff than I do, that's for sure.

Why would you pay for Flickr?

Unless you're uploading more than 100MB of photos a month, there's no need to pay for a Pro account on Flickr. Storage space is unlimited, there's no bandwidth charges, and they allow <img> tag embedding so long as the photo links back to the photo's Flickr page.

That's not to discount the do-it-yourself option, but if Flickr happens to provide everything you need, why bother installing software on your webserver? (Especially considering you'll need to keep an ear out for security updates, probably by subscribing to a mailing list. PHP-written programs have earned a reputation for insecurity for a reason, but security updates are a reality for web-facing programs in any language.)

Try Media Wiki

Wikimedia commons runs on it.

Another Question along the same lines

I recently had a client ask about which photo sharing software to build his web site around. He has a his own dedicated server, disk space and memory are not a problem, but I/O bandwidth and CPU are limited (2x 160Gig drives on IDE cables, some 64 bit AMD processor at 2 GHz or so). His special needs are that he has 40,000 photos or more to put up, and needs a flexible password mechanism so various clients can look at only certain parts of the site, and the internet at large can not spider his collection easily.

He has already tried Gallery 1 & 2, but found that both versions collapse under the weight of a hierarchy of 20,000 photos. Even with just one user browsing, it slows to a crawl when it tries to discover photos up or down the hierarchy. There are knobs in G2 to limit the updates to mySql for things like view count or voting, but those are nothing more than taping over the cracks.

I think he said recently he is trying Coppermine, but has similar problems.

I'll certainly be pointing him to this thread, but if any /.ers know of systems that hold up to a massively large photo set, please reply under this post.

My suggestion to him was to cut down the resolution and quality of the photos, so G2 can process them faster, but it didn't work. It seems the problems stem from the sheer numbers of photos, and limits of mySql. Maybe some tuning of mySql is in order.

the AC

Color profiles

I should have thought to ask this before now nobody will see it... I've been searching for such a software before, but none of those tested will handle embedded color profiles. It's fairly simple: if you submit a large image with an embedded color profile different from sRGB, the image gets saved, a medium sized image is created for web display by converting it to sRGB and also a thumbnail the same way. Also if you submit a TIF or (god forbid), a RAW, the app should try to convert it to jpg. I wrote my own in bash+cgi+ImageMagick but it's buggy and not ready for prime time. Anything better ?!?