Tong Family

More on getting photo gallery to work right: Gallery

Right now I’ll stay focused on getting a decent photo gallery thing running. Went through the basic MovableType File Upload stuff. it is OK for a few photos, but it wouldn’t really scale to larger sets. I need something that will take my c:\pictures directory and be smart about doing essentially a projection on this up to the web with thumbnails, etc. So, I’m off to get Gallery running on my non-standard, Apache on Windows installation. Here are the detailed notes:

1. PHP Gallery. Take the download from there and extract it into the main Apache directory. This is c:\program files\apache group\apache\htdocs on my server.
2. Follow the readme and edit httpd.conf with the directory override.
3. Follow the instructions when you execute http://yourhost/gallery/setup. BTW, this is a great way to do setup, actually have it check to see what is available.
4. Mod_rewrite.soApache for Windows doesn’t have the rewrite_mod loaded by default, so download and edit httpd.conf and put it in the modules directory. BTW, if you net start apache and it fails, check the eventlog, it is pretty good about telling you what line of the httpd.conf failed. YOu have to add the lines:
   
   AllowOverride Options FileInfo
   
   LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
   AddModule mod_rewrite.c

5. Netpbm. This is a download and then setting the path. You have to install from here as these are nicely tuned for Gallery and don’t require recompilation.
6. JHead. These let you read the headers that digital cameras put on JPEGs. Very nice and convenient. It is just a DOS program, so you just copy it somewhere and remember the path. I used c:\program files\gallery\jhead.exe to be neat since I didn’t want them in the htdocs file.
7. Unzip and . There are both unzip and zipinfo that it needs to process, so these are commandline DOS or Unix things that you have to download.
8. Cygwin. This is where unzip is as are lots fo the utilities that come with Unix, so that you can make Windows feel like Unix. A little confusing how it works, but it is pretty cool to install into c:\cygwin and have Unix with a BASH shell on Windows!
9. Gallery Remote. Install this Java desktop program to do drag and drop additions of photos.

Well, another late night, but it appears to work on my Windows/Apache machine. It is a better idea than Movable Type because it really is all about bulk photos rather than just one at a time. Only bummer is that it doesn’t really have the notion of time and date and archiving like a blog. But, it is far more efficient for slamming massive pictures on the web and has a nice user interface too! Tomorrow I’ll put it up on Geekfishing and then I’ll have to spring for more disk space!
BTW I found blogdex – the weblog diffusion index. I need to start looking at RSS feeds and so forth at some point.