Andrew Jones briefly answers a question about putting photos into your blog at : Mac, blog and photos. Both the suggestions cater for simple blogging – Blogger + Flickr or Typepad. (Flickr can be used with other blogging systems too – see here for the list).
Now that works probably for a lot of people but I’m thinking about setting up some photo galleries – with the option of using some of the images in a blog or two – but want more control for the set up. I already have my own web host with database, PHP/Perl and other features, and would like to configure the set up how I’d like. I’d also like to be able to provide access control – for viewing and for others to upload – and to set default parameters for maximum photo dimensions and file sizes etc. I’m also not keen of “giving” my photos to someone else to manage and then having people who need to access them giving personal information to a third party.
Enter Gallery which seems to do most of what I need, is open source and has some sort of integration with various CMSs and blogs like Movable Type (plug-in here). From the Gallery web site,
Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own website. You must have your own website with PHP support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums can have read, write and caption permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. Give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your website!
Now, I have all of my photos set up in iPhoto on my iBook where they have meta-data (comments, dates, times, titles etc.) linked to the photo. I don’t want to have to do the whole export photos from iPhoto to a folder (losing the meta-data), use the Gallery Java-based importer to upload them (slowly) and then have to renter the details in Gallery. So I was overjoyed to discover: iPhotoToGallery which is a plug-in for iPhoto (version 2+) that allows you to select your photo’s in iPhoto, select export from the file menu and send them to Gallery on the server (see screenshot). How cool is that? Now my only limits are disk-space and upload bandwidth.
Anyway, for those of you who have a technical bent, want more control over the look-and-feel of your photo sets, and access controls for others then this might work for you. I’ll be trying it out over the next few weeks to see how it works but as always YMMV.
