photo gallery

[katiepie]

I currently have a static html photo gallery of around 500 images on my website. This number is due to increase to up to 5000. My aim is to have a searchable image database. I am currently studying web application development but not yet reached the point of being able to create this myself.. I do have a budget (limited) so purchasing software is an option.. Wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Cheers!

[Fang]

Have a look at CMS Gallery (http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=142), or one of the other CMS's

[dreesemonkey]

Depending on your web host, you may have some software avaliable to you to use. The two I have avaliable on my hoster, 4Images and coppermine photo gallery.

On the other hand, I decided that I would create my own so that it would look the same as the rest of my page. I used PHP/mySQL learning along the way and it honestly didn't take too long to fumble through it. If you have time to invest in learning it, it's not too difficult and it's a neat project.

[katiepie]

Thanks for all the suggestions. My preference would be to create my own like you said, using PHP/mySQL, however as this is something that at this point no pretty much nothing about, can you suggest a starting point?!

[dreesemonkey]

Originally posted by katiepie
Thanks for all the suggestions. My preference would be to create my own like you said, using PHP/mySQL, however as this is something that at this point no pretty much nothing about, can you suggest a starting point?!

Well, first of all it's helpful to understand how database's work, or rather how data is stored in a relational database. If you understand that much you can skip the next paragraph.

For example, my gallery consists of two tables in mysql gallery, and gallery_items. In the gallery table there are a few fields: gallery_id, category, gallery_name to name a few. In the gallery_items table there are quite a few more fields like: gallery_id (to assign what gallery it is a part of), thumb_url, small_url, large_url (all URLs pointing to the different sized pictures on the server) to name a few.

Basically what the php page does when displaying a gallery is run a select query on the gallery_items table for the field gallery_id that was passed on the address line (for instance you'd see http://www.dreesemonkey.com/viewgallery.php?id=43 on the address bar, the 43 being the gallery_id). The query returns the records that match that gallery_id, then php just processes the images and displays them in a table.

Really the hardest part is the initial setup of the database and the php page displaying it correctly. Once you can do and understand that, then worry about the forms to automatically create the database entries and upload the pictures.

If you need help or want to see the code that I have on my site, I could send it to you via e-mail or even post it on here, depending on what you want to see. It may even force me to put proper commenting in there while I'm at it! ;)

It may seem like a daunting task as first, but you can learn a lot of good basic php and mysql skills. It's the most complex thing I've done so far, but then again I'm just getting started as well.

[katiepie]

thanks for that, I think I will give it a go and see how I get on! I do have another question, potential users on my site frequently get there via google image search, do you know if images stored/presented in this way are picked up by google? (hope that makes sense!)

[dreesemonkey]

Originally posted by katiepie
thanks for that, I think I will give it a go and see how I get on! I do have another question, potential users on my site frequently get there via google image search, do you know if images stored/presented in this way are picked up by google? (hope that makes sense!)

That's a very good question, and I'm not 100% of the answer. A good friend of mine is far more accomplished in web development than I am, he said that the way google spiders pages will basically ignore urls that have something like viewgallery.php?id=43... There is a workaround, and I'm not sure what it's called but basically instead of the above url, it would be viewgallery/43/ or something like that.

Again, I'm sorry I'm not sure how it works or what it's called, (and even the google image search may spider things differently than the regular web search... not sure) but there is some sort of work-around.

[Fang]

Readable URIs (http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/readable-uri)