Advertisment

Online Photo Gallery 

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

Those of you who have huge digital images scattered in various places and want to compile all of these images in a central repository, allowing others to use it online as well, then Gallery 2.0 is meant for you. 

Advertisment

The application not only lets you store the pictures at a centralized location, it also lets you organize and tag them with relevant names, captions, description and keywords. It comes with photo-management features that include an automatic thumbnail creation system, image resizing and rotation, ordering, captioning and searching capabilities. You can search for any photograph by its name, caption or even date. 

Direct Hit!
Applies to: Network managers
USP:

Managing your digital photo albums from a centralized repository.
Primary Link:

http://Gallery.menalto.com/ 
Google keywords:

Gallery 2.0 
On PCQXtreme CD: gallery-2.0.tar.gz 

This is a Web-based application and anyone with a Web browser can easily access it. Well, you just might think that what's an application like this doing in an enterprise implementation section-its basic image storing capability is a boon for any media house, ad agency or graphics house. This application can also be used by any organization for managing their images. And if you get a little creative, then maybe, you can also use it as a rudimentary document-management system, wherein you can scan all your documents and save them as images. Of course, you would then also need to take care of all the security issues as well, if you do that. 

Advertisment

Plus you would need to invest in a good document scanner as well. But then do not expect features like image compression and document check-in/check-out. 

Pre-requisites



Gallery 2.0 can run on both Windows or Linux. It, however, needs PHP to be installed, as well as a MySQL database to store all its information. An Image Processing Library like ImageMagik is also necessary. We've used a Windows XP system and Apache Web server. 

The EasyPHP package available at www.easyphp.org will install all the above for you in the easiest possible way. The Gallery package is available on this month's PCQXtreme CD, you can install it from there.

Advertisment

Installing Gallery



Copy the file from the PCQXtreme CD and unzip its contents into Web server's root (www folder). Using Windows Explorer, navigate to this folder and create a subfolder called 'g2data' there. Now, configure MySQL for Gallery.



Start the MySQL database from Start>Programs>Easy PHP and you will see the Easy PHP icon on your system tray. Next, create a database in MySQL as follows. 

C:\> cd\Program Files\EasyPHP1-8\mysql\bin



C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-8\mysql\bin> mysqladmin -uroot create Gallery2


C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-8\mysql\bin> mysql Gallery2 -uroot —e“GRANT ALL ON Gallery2.* TO
username@localhost



DENTIFIED BY 'password'”

Advertisment

After this, open a browser window and navigate to http://127.0.0.1/Gallery/install. A Web page will open showing the Gallery installation screen. Click on 'Begin Installation' link to proceed. It will show you some code, copy it to Notepad and save it as login.txt. Copy this file to 'C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-8\www\Gallery' folder. 

Now, on the same page, click on the 'Authenticate me' link. This will automatically log you in and move to the 'System Check' page. The installer will check your system for compatibility and ensure that the prerequisites have been met. Make sure that all checks are successful. 

For the installation type, select the 'standard single install' 

Advertisment

option. The Multi-site option will let you install Gallery on other servers as well. Now set up the storage and database for Gallery. On the database configuration page, select the database type and enter the authentication information. 

After that, you will be required to set up an administration password for the application. Fill that up and also provide a name and an e-mail address (both optional). Click on Create to create the user. On the next page, the installer will create 'config.php' file in the Gallery folder. This contains all the answers you provided to the installer in the previous pages.

You can now proceed to select the modules to install as required. You can come back after installation is complete and change them as required. Finally, you will get a 'Check Security' page, where Gallery 2 will walk you through the process of locking down the 'config.php' file. Continue through the pages till the installation completes.

Advertisment

Before Apache can serve the Gallery application over your network, you need to change one setting in the 'httpd.conf' file. To change this setting, go to the 'C:\Program Files\EasyPHP1-8\apache\conf' folder and open the file in Notepad. 



Here, scroll down and locate the line starting with 'Listen' and replace the IP address with the non-loopback address of this machine, which is,
Listen 192.168.3.24:80 

Restart your Apache server and with that, you will be able to access the Gallery with its IP address (or a name, if you have configured it on DNS) from any machine on your local network. 

Using Gallery 



You can now go to any machine on your network and navigate to the /gallery folder on this Web server (http://192.168.3.24 /gallery). It will show you a page with no albums. On the same page, go to the login text box and login as 'admin' and enter the password you set for this user during installation. Another page will appear with a link 'site admin', click on it and you will be

taken to a new page where you can create new users, albums,  sub-albums, set up quotas and also execute

database-maintenance scripts. 

Advertisment

You can create new albums and assign users and privileges to each

Every user on Gallery gets an empty album associated with his login name, and he can upload, delete and modify the digital photographs in his album the way he wants. In addition, he can even set permissions for his album, which he may or may not want to give access to either view or edit. Administrators can create a repository of various types of albums and can set restrictions for each user, in this repository. 

You can add new digital photos, for that browse to the homepage of your new Gallery site and click on the 'Add Items' link. This will bring up a page with different upload options. You can upload pictures individually with a caption, description and search

keywords. 

To search for pictures in the Gallery, you simply need to type the keywords in the 'Search the Gallery' textbox. And within a few seconds you will be shown pictures displayed in the frames

corresponding to the searched keyword. 

Sanjay Majumder

Advertisment