Suggestion for photo album

Hi, I'd like to have a photo album on my dreamhost hosted site. Does anyone have good recommendations on which photo gallery package to use?
- I want to put as little time into this as possible
- I want the installation/setup instructions to be super clear and as braindead as possible
- I have never before used MySQL or PHP, so you can imagine why I want the instructions to be clear
- It should be free.

Thanks!

I like SimpleViewer (http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/) -- it makes nice-looking Flash-based galleries that load quickly, and require very little time, except in uploading. Also, as I remember, it requires neither MySQL nor PHP.

Gallery's one of the more popular photo albums, and it works quite well, too.

I never liked Gallery's interface and always recommended Coppermine previously, but it does not work properly with Dreamhost's setup of PHP as CGI so I can no longer recommend it for use at DH.

What part of Coppermine doesn't work with PHP-CGI? I haven't noticed any problems with mine (1.3.3), but then again, I don't do anything fancy with it.

Yes, Gallery is good and is fairly simple to install. Another DH customer has written a good installation guide specifically for Dreamhost hosting:

http://www.wombatnation.com/misc/installGalleryDreamHost.html

TorbenGB

Wonder if DreamHost would include Gallery in their one-click installs soon ...

I like Passion but that could be because it was created by another DreamHost user :-) It's pretty simple and I promise you it runs on DreamHost :)

happylittlethings.com

Another vote for Gallery. Although a couple of people have told me that they found it really difficult to install and/or configure, I had no problems at all when I installed following the instructions at the page TorbenGB linked to above.

When I went searching for applications to create watermakers, I stumbled upon ThumbHTML.

It's quite a nice little utility that will create a full fledged basic photo gallary in HTML or PHP using any image directory. It's kind of sweet, and supplies nice features for Watermarking.

You just point it to your photo directory, select a destination, set your preferences and hit 'Batch Process'. It'll resize your images to thumbnails and resize your main images to a "image likeable" size (default 600 pix max height/width). Then you goto the create html tab, select HTML or PHP and create. Viala!

Only disadvantage I see in this is two things;
- It's pretty static. Aside from it being PHP driven, it's a create all. I don't see any "append" options.
- It's not a server side photo library creator. It has to run on your Windows system and you upload the outputted files to your server.

Don't know what features you need, but if you are after something that is dead simple to set up and maintain, I recommend Simple PHP Gallery (SPG) from http://relativelyabsolute.com/spg/
All the best -
marsbar

Edit: SPG runs on DreamHost, and it does not require MySQL.

Edited by marsbar on 05/08/05 08:38 PM (server time).

Well I am using WP with an embedded (Gallery2), works very sweetly allowing you to post photos within blog entries, and sync users between WP and G2..

And the cost, both applications are free, hoping to convince Dreamhost to turn Gallery2 into a one click install when it goes final release :-)

____________________

WP/Gallery2 Integration Community -> http://wpg2.ozgreg.com/

In reply to:
What part of Coppermine doesn't work with PHP-CGI?

Deleting logged ecards, language switching, and theme switching are the functions that spit errors for me. If you look at admin tools phpinfo you will find several PHP server variables pointing at DH's cgi-bin instead of the coppermine script directory.

In reply to:
Deleting logged ecards, language switching, and theme switching are the functions that spit errors for me. If you look at admin tools phpinfo you will find several PHP server variables pointing at DH's cgi-bin instead of the coppermine script directory.

ahh, I see... I wasn't experiencing this because I was using my own version of PHP. The problem seems to be related to the "cgi.fix_pathinfo" setting in php.ini. I have that option turned on, which is not the default. (This option sets SCRIPT_NAME and SCRIPT_FILENAME to point to the PHP script rather than the PHP CGI, and also affects PATH_TRANSLATED and PATH_INFO in a similar manner.)

I'm not sure why this option is off by default. Changing it seems to fix lots of things, and hasn't broken anything for me. In fact, that one setting was the whole reason I decided to compile my own PHP in the first place.

I found instructions for compiling php5 locally on the wiki. Are there comparable instructions for 4.whatever, specific to DH, handy somewhere that you know of?

In reply to:
I found instructions for compiling php5 locally on the wiki. Are there comparable instructions for 4.whatever, specific to DH, handy somewhere that you know of?

I believe there are, but I don't have a URL...

I'd imagine you could get away with using the same instructions, removing the following PHP5-specific stuff from the PHP configure line (near the bottom):

--with-libxml-dir=$HOME/php
--enable-soap
--with-xsl=$HOME/php
--enable-sqlite-utf8
--with-mysqli

You could add these to enable PHP 4's XML features:
--with-dom=$HOME/php
--with-dom-xslt=$HOME/php
--with-dom-exslt=$HOME/php
--enable-xslt

You should also be able to get coppermine to work with PHP 5 by enabling the register_long_arrays option.

Thank you very much. It seems that register_long_arrays is on by default. The one coppermine install I have in a dedicated gallery subdomain seems to work with the php5 procedure right out of the box. Yay!

I have another domain with a second gallery that is in one folder, with an invision board in another folder in the same domain. When I get brave, I'll try setting up that domain to use it too. Thanks for the help. Kind regards ...
Edited by haggis on 05/09/05 08:54 PM (server time).

i've been wanting to use Gallery but I can't follow the instructions provided in the knowledge base or the link in this thread. I get stuck where you connect to DreamHost server using ssh. I downloaded putty but after trying to log in via ssh Dreamhost closes the connection and puts out a message :

Welcome to sektor.dreamhost.com

Any malicious and/or unauthorized activity is strictly forbidden.
All activity may be logged by DreamHost Web Hosting.

Last login: Thu Jul 7 00:01:05 2005 from ip68-etc-etc

This account allows only ftp connections.

In your DH control panel, go to the Users section and edit the ftp user. Tick the 'Shell user' box to add shell privileges, and save the change. Then you'll be able to ssh in.

thanks for the tip haggis it worked.

however i'm still tearing my hair out trying to get gallery installed... i don't know how everyone found it simple =) makes me feel like a complete dummy.

i was able to get everything installed but then got stuck on the configuration. when i open the browser to domain.com/gallery and hit the configuration wizard it doesn't let me get past that page. It says I need to correct some problems to proceed. From what I can tell the only serious problem warning is :

The exec() function is what Gallery uses to launch programs such as NetPBM, ImageMagick, and jhead. If exec() is disabled on your server then Gallery will not be able operate

The exec() function is disabled on your server. Gallery will not function with this PHP configuration.

I wonder if i'll ever get through this :-(

Are you running php as cgi? That is the only way to install Gallery and get past those errors.

If you are, I am not sure what's going wrong. If you are not, you'll need to add

AddType php-cgi .php

To the htaccess page at the root of Gallery. That means you will have to add it back in after it runs the installer. It IS confusing but it will work.