PhotoFrame - another free PHP tool for managing photos

[Kerry Raymond]

While we are discussing free PHP tools, there is a very useful free tool
called PhotoFrame that makes it trivial to put up a set of photos onto the
Web. It's available here:

http://photoframe.sourceforge.net/

Now this isn't a genealogy tool - it doesn't care whether the photos are of
your ancestors or cans of baked beans. But we've used it on our WWW site to
display photos of headstones in local cemeteries. Here's a small cemetery as
an example:

http://www.ChapelHill.homeip.net/Family ... -Brisbane/

The beauty of PhotoFrame is that all you need to do is copy your JPG photos
from your digital camera (or scanner) into a folder on your WWW site and
copy in the file index.php (which is provided) and, hey presto, you have a
WWW-based photo album with thumbnails, resizing, and slideshowing etc
magically created for you. If you want to, you can do a little more work to
customise it by editting some fields (e.g. to set the title of the album,
size to resize the photos to so they fit nicely on screen). You can also set
up a "intro" page for each album (which we use to give a bit of description
of each cemetery) and customised page headers and footers (which we don't
use). There is support for user feedback/comments (optionally moderated by
you, but we don't bother with any of this either).

So, if you have a PHP-enabled WWW server (whether at home or your ISP or at
a Web hosting company), give Photo Frame a try! We were very impressed at
how easy it was.

The Photo Frame site also pointed us to a very useful little (and free!)
Windows application called edjgpcom (Edit JPG Comment) which also you to
embed the caption of a photo into the JPG file. This is very useful as the
caption is copied along with the file -- too many photo album tools store
the captions separately and when you copy the JPG file on its own, the
caption does not come with it. edjgpcom works well with Photo Frame as Photo
Frame's default is to assume the caption of the photo is in that comment
field.

http://home.cfl.rr.com/maderik/edjpgcom/

So we've used edjpgcom to add the captions to our headstone photos and then
PhotoFrame to display it (see our WWW site above), and been very happy with
the results of this free software for the small amount of effort required on
our part.

Just one comment though. The first time you view the album over the WWW, it
is very slow, as it is generating the thumb nails and resizing photos etc on
demand. However, these are cached in a sub-folder, so subsequent viewings
don't incur this delay in processing. Generally, after I set up an album, I
slideshow the whole album via the WWW (causing all the files to be
generated) before advertising the availability of the site to other people.

NB: we have no connection with Photo Frame or edjgpcom, except as happy
users.

Kerry

[J. Hugh Sullivan]

On Sun, 10 Apr 2005 21:44:55 +1000, "Kerry Raymond"
<[email protected]> wrote:

While we are discussing free PHP tools, there is a very useful free tool
called PhotoFrame that makes it trivial to put up a set of photos onto the
Web. It's available here:

http://photoframe.sourceforge.net/

Picasa is very good and Adobe Reader 7 includes Adobe Photoshop
(Starter Edition) if you wish.

Photo Plus by Serif allows some additional abilities but my experience
is that Serif puts all sorts of crap all over your computer. It's like
dust in that you can never get rid of it. And I don't like programs
which don't allow you to change the installation folder (does Serif
still do that?).

I recommend that accomplished computer users try every program that
attracts their interest to see which serves their purposes best.

Hugh

[Peter]

Kerry Raymond wrote:
<snip>

So, if you have a PHP-enabled WWW server ...

There's the rub. Most people don't have PHP on their PC, and want to
distribute photos to other people who also don't have PHP.

A photo album utility that has less dependencies might suit more people.


Peter

[Rgemini]

"Peter" said...

Kerry Raymond wrote:
snip
So, if you have a PHP-enabled WWW server ...

There's the rub. Most people don't have PHP on their PC, and want to
distribute photos to other people who also don't have PHP.

A photo album utility that has less dependencies might suit more people.

I've had very good results with JAlbum from http://jalbum.net. It requires

Java on the machine where the image website is to be assembled before being
FTPd to the web server and most (all?) of the templates use Javascript for
navigation. It is free, has a strong user base and very flexible without
being difficult to learn. It will even update the website via FTP and only
include changed files. Java is also free, of course. According to the
website, " JAlbum runs on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and others and speaks 22
languages. Today JAlbum is mentioned over 1.600.000 times on the Internet
(Google/Altavista) and this site has over 6000 visitors per day and a live
community."

Well worth a look.

Roy Ayres (Eltham, UK)

[Gjest]

For managing photos, I am using Anyphoto Manager
(http://www.any-photo-album-software) and have been pleased with it so far. It
can help you acquire, organize, browse, optimize and share your digital
photos. Well made software. I love it, very professional at image
managing.

[Kerry Raymond]

"Peter" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...

Kerry Raymond wrote:
snip
So, if you have a PHP-enabled WWW server ...

There's the rub. Most people don't have PHP on their PC, and want to
distribute photos to other people who also don't have PHP.

Maybe you are confusing PHP with some other technology?

PHP is purely server-side and is available with many WWW servers (usually
just a config issue to turn it on).
There is no requirement for the client to have PHP installed; most of us are
using PHP-based WWW sites all the time
as it's very widely used, but we just don't notice it as the PHP on the
server side is generating HTML that loads in any browser.

Kerry