So my girlfriend (now fiancée) and I recently got back from two weeks in Hawaii. I took some 340-odd digital photos. Of course, when we got home, everybody was clamoring to see our pictures right now. I ended up doing impromptu displays on my laptop, but that can be about as exciting as the traditional unending slide projector show of doom.

I know some people like to use online services to make their photos widely available, but I've always found the quality of those sites to suck, at best.

Another possibility are the various and sundry PHP photo managers or automatic HTML generation tools built into iPhoto, ACDSee, or whatnot. You get somewhat better control and cataloging, but the resulting web experience still sucks.

For the past few years, I've been choosing my favorites, indivually Photoshopping them, and placing them in hand-tuned HTML, but this is just insanely labor intensive. It took me almost two days of work to get my Hawaiian vacation page together, despite having all manner of shell scripts to do the easy but repetitive parts, like generating HTML wrappers for images, and making the thumbnails.

Anyone have any better answers? (Aside from perhaps going back to Hawaii and having several of those umbrella drinks in coconuts?) I'm intrigued by Picasa, but it doesn't support any "raw" image formats yet, which means my pipeline still needs to include flakey Canon software. Although I understand that non-Canon RAW converters do exist, they just dump the interpolated image. You then need to color-correct and tweak every single image, rather than just the ones that the raw converter can't get right on its own.

Do you have your own website? Does it support PHP? Have you tried Gallery?

For an example, you can see mine here. That is just one of the albums. There is a greater overview on the main page.

The part that always wows the friends and family that view my photos there is the slideshow. You should definitely check that out.

I find it is a far better way to share my photos rather than sending relatives a disc or something.

*edit*
ps- congratulations! I'm sure the Hawaiian vacation sure helped the engagement

I don't really have anything specific to add. I've recently started using Gallery, and find it limiting and slow. It's still probably the best thing i've found for putting pictures on a web page. It also doesn't do lossless jpg rotation, which is a large drawback for me.

The real problem for me is that there isn't a good ID3 style tag for images. This means that every photo management system starts from scratch and usualy relies on it's own database tied to the path/filename. Four or five years ago I spent hours labeling who was in every photo in ThumbsPlus (the best thing around back then IMHO) only to loose it all when I changed computers and moved all the files. I won't spend the time again until any information I add is embedded in the file.

Matthew

Do exif headers do that?

What do you find "limiting and slow" about Gallery, slow in particular? Just curious.

Exif headers seem to be a great step forward in getting information from the camera but they don't seem to be set up for storing descriptions and such. I should investigate them more before I compleetly give up on them, however.

Adding pictures is what is slow for me. I've tried the web interface and the Gallery Remote and havn't liked either of them much. The web interface just isn't practical, and Gallery Remote didn't order things how I wanted easily, and didn't give enough uploading status. Both just choked when I throw a 2meg video clip at them. I think it's an apache problem, but neither failed gracefully.

Limiting wise, I've got an album of photos I want to move into another album. I havn't found a way to move them all at once, unless I move the album itself. So I guess that means it's missing group operations on multiple files. I'm also still looking for a "here's a batch of thumbnails, which ones do you want to rotate losslessly" function.

I'm still new to it, so there's plenty I may not have discovered yet.

Matthew

EXIF headers, or rather the more important IPTC, will handle everything you could possibly want. It's supported in Photoshop (File Info) and any decent image application.

My favourite tool for touching this data (the last time I did that type of work) is EXIFER. Just do a search for it.

After many hours (days and days) of searching for image management software, Photools' IMATCH came right to the top with no equals.

I think a number of topics are getting meshd in this thread however. If you need to manipulate your images after you take them from your camera, you're still going to need to touch something like Photoshop or another editing package. Possibly multiple packages. Photoshop handles batch operations pretty easily and there are filters available to import both Canon and Nikon RAW files.

Bruno

I think a number of topics are getting meshd in this thread however.

Exactly. I've worked out a kludgy pipeline from my camera, through raw file conversion, Photoshop (color correction, cropping, spotting, contrast/brightness, etc.), DreamWeaver, and a bunch of shell scripts, to make web pages that aren't as good as I'd really like to have. What I'm really looking for are tools or just random thoughts about how to optimize my production pipeline. I like the idea of using EXIF tags in the same fashion as ID3 tags. You just need browsers that let you manipulate them as easily as iTunes or Tag & Rename.

The real problem for me is that there isn't a good ID3 style tag for images.

I hadn't really thought about this issue, but, yes, it's pretty surprising that no tag-like extension has emerged in something like PNG.

And in an effort to mash even *more* subjects into this thread, I can say I had this very odd thought:

If Ogg has this open-ended "comment" tag structure and should let you include images (say, of cover art), then all we really need is an agreed extension of various comments for photos, then you can add all of your pics to Ogg files (with very short recordings of silence *or* audio comments by the photographer for that matter)

I'm going to go look to see if anybody at Xiph got drunk this weekend and is already doing this!

Sounds like your pipeline is about as optimal as it's going to get up to the point where you start running the shell scripts. When I did my Costa Rica pictures (warning... dsl link), I wrote two scripts -- one to generate the thumbnails from the Gimped images, and one PHP script to be my album. I didn't use any EXIF tags, or anything like that -- I encoded what I needed to know in the filename (day, shot number, if it was retouched, if it's a crop, and who took it), and then tossed all the captions into flat text files read by the PHP script. Ultimately, using EXIF tags would be more robust, but then I'd have to fill out all the tags, and need to have whatever web-page generator I'm using read EXIF tags. The latter shouldn't be too much trouble, but when you're wading through 300+ images doing retouching, etc, let me tell ya, the more info you can pack into a single letter of a filename, the easier your life gets.

Cheers,

Edit: Nice pics, BTW. I should probably trim mine down one of these days...

Adding pictures is what is slow for me. I've tried the web interface and the Gallery Remote and havn't liked either of them much. The web interface just isn't practical, and Gallery Remote didn't order things how I wanted easily, and didn't give enough uploading status. Both just choked when I throw a 2meg video clip at them. I think it's an apache problem, but neither failed gracefully.

This has been my experience too, even taking the approach of putting the files onto the server myself and then asking Gallery to import them from there it would still die if I asked it to import the couple of hundred files I wanted to load it with in one go.

This happened whichever upload method I tried, generally leaving the album in a very broken state.

That was enough to convince me that I wouldn't be using Gallery for my own photos (I was setting then up for a friend). I am busy rolling my own web based gallery system with on the fly thumbnail generation and photo categorization.

For my photos, I've gone Old-Skool. I use a PQI TravelFlash adapter to get the pictures off the CF cards that I use with my Canon Digital IXUS v.

To get the pictures up on my website, I use rsync, with ssh. Occasionally, I use FTP.

Once they're there, I generate the HTML using album, from MarginalHacks.com. It uses Perl for the theme engine, so it's very configurable. I don't do Perl, so I've only tweaked it a little.

Adding pictures is what is slow for me. I've tried the web interface and the Gallery Remote and havn't liked either of them much. The web interface just isn't practical, and Gallery Remote didn't order things how I wanted easily, and didn't give enough uploading status. Both just choked when I throw a 2meg video clip at them. I think it's an apache problem, but neither failed gracefully.
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This has been my experience too, even taking the approach of putting the files onto the server myself and then asking Gallery to import them from there it would still die if I asked it to import the couple of hundred files I wanted to load it with in one go.

This must be on a person-to-person basis, because I have no problem with the method you mention, Andy. That is how I load all my pictures into the Gallery, and it takes much less time than it has to.

I mean, it has to load the picture, check for EXIF info, and check for image size. Then if the size is larger than your intermediate size, it has to make another image for that size, then it has to make the thumbnail, name all these files, and I'm sure it's doing a couple other things that I'm not thinking of at the moment. All this seems to take about 1-2 seconds an image for me if I'm loading the images from the server.

I'd second Album, I spent weeks fighting with Gallery and found it a tad flakey with large numbers of images. I tried all the hacks and it didn't make a difference. I'm very happy with Album, it's not as easily tweakable (like Gallery) but for me it's fine...

I used to run it under Cygwin on Win 2K on my Laptop and it worked a treat. I've now got a bigger HD so I can dual boot

I am busy rolling my own web based gallery system with on the fly thumbnail generation and photo categorization.

I just got done doing the exact same thing on my gallery website. I wrote a few php pages to manage images that were FTP'd up to the server. Basically, the script checks for any changes in the file listing in it's directory, then if there are changes (picture added, picture deleted) it will generate the appropriate thumbnails (using Imagemagick's convert) and screen-sized images, and write out the whole deal to an XML file that keeps track of the directory. I included a quick authentication piece so I can login and move/edit/delete photos right on the webpage. If anyone wants the source, let me know and I'll post it here, it's not bulletproof yet, but it may be useful.

That is how I load all my pictures into the Gallery, and it takes much less time than it has to.

It isn't the speed that I have a problem with, when it works it is fast. The problem is I would throw a couple of hundred images at it and it would die after processing a few dozen of them.

The problem is I would throw a couple of hundred images at it and it would die after processing a few dozen of them.

This is not the proper behavior for Gallery. Perhaps some of your PHP settings are not right?

I uploaded this album of over 2,000 images in one session. On a 700MHz VIA C3 no less.

I just got done doing the exact same thing on my gallery website. I wrote a few php pages to manage images that were FTP'd up to the server. Basically, the script checks for any changes in the file listing in it's directory, then if there are changes (picture added, picture deleted) it will generate the appropriate thumbnails (using Imagemagick's convert) and screen-sized images, and write out the whole deal to an XML file that keeps track of the directory.

I'm going the extra step of only generating (and then caching) the thumbnails when the user views them. I'm also giving the user the choice of different sized thumbnails for those poor modem users.

I am also writing out an XML file to hold info on the photos. My album software is being writen in .Net

This is not the proper behavior for Gallery. Perhaps some of your PHP settings are not right?

Who knows ? I followed the install and setup instructions, did some upgrading of PHP etc.

I also tried it on both Linux and Win2k (both using Apache), I had the same problems on both.

My album software is being writen in .Net

*tthhhhbbbbtttttt*

Here is my (custom-written) solution -- five pre-sized variants of each photo, so that folks with faster links can see more detail, and those on dial-ups can opt for speed:

http://rtr.ca/my_dock/

Mind ya, this runs on my own server at the end of my own DSL link, so I have full control over most aspects.

Cheers

Don't want the source to the gallery code right now... But... If you have detailed plans for the router table I'm all ears! Very nice. I'm moving in August and will have my garage space available as a shop. Some quality tables and fixtures for my tools are sorely missing.

Bruno

I don't have plans for it (just sketched it out and built it) but if you like, PM me and I'll send you some pics of how I built it and measurements.

On the subject of public photo sites, I use fotki.com - this seems quite decent in that you upload the full-sized originals (and can optionally offer them to users), and you can create password protected galleries too.

Not free, but not too costly if you also consider it as an off-site backup of your full-res snaps.

Hugo

One more option for displaying images is ids. Which I use (warning, slow DSL line). I like it because there is no real import process, you can just dump photos (or new directories of photos) into a directory and it automatically creates galleries and previews as needed. Also does nice things like on the fly resizing, rotation, searching, posting picture comments, ordering from shutterfly, displaying EXIF info, etc. It is written in perl and uses a variety of themes based on template files that are pretty easy to customize even if you don't know perl. Anyway, it is the best solution I have seen.

-Mike

Interestingly, I like Gallery specifically because it doesn't require that you just dump them in a directory, but has an upload facility. It's much easier for me to be able to upload them than transfer them some other way.

Also, I prefer Gallery's creating thumbnails and whatnot at upload time, and not at run time, as I prefer to keep the CPU load down.

Rock on with your hand tuned HTML! If that page in your first link is infact hand done HTML, then good work!