On Thursday 15 January 2004 16:09, Chris Green wrote:
Can anyone recommend a CGI (or other) server side application for managing images (and possibly text documents)?
What I want is a very simple way to be able to navigate a hierarchy of directories with photos in them without having to (re)write HTML whenever pictures are added or moved around. The directory hierarchy will provide all the indexing I want.
E.G. I want a directory hierachy on my web server with the top level directory called, say, "pictures". I will then create subdirectories under "pictures" such as "dogs", "horses", "housesInFrance", etc. I want the server side script to enable me to navigate the directories easily, so when I go to http://www.my.server/pictures I would expect to automatically see a link to "dogs", and if I navigto "dogs" I want to see the pictures that are in that directory.
Thinking about it I doubt if this can be done dynamically but a script to autogenerate all the required linking HTML would be OK, it can be run whenever the picture hierarchy is changed.
I suppose even more wonderful would be a way to 'drop' images and such onto a web page and they will be FTPed up to the server and added to the phot album - however that does seem a little too good to be true.
If the Gallery program referred to by Brett - or a similar product - doesn't do the job you could roll your own, assuming you're not averse to some programming. Having been banging around in this area for some time I can offer the following comments. Apologies if I'm telling Granny how to suck eggs:
1. Server side programming requires the permission of the owner of the server. No ISP will allow you to run anything you like in case it takes down other users. If you have your own machine with a permanent connection you have free rein.
2. Pictures for viewing in a browser are a different animal to what comes out of your digital camera. We're talking about a 50k VGA JPEG in the one case and 4 MB (or more) in the other. And there's little point in uploading a huge picture to the server if you only ever want to see it in VGA size.
3. It takes time - lots of it on a 56k dialup - to upload big images. The process takes so long that if you simply send a large POST a browser like Internet Explorer will time out before the transfer finishes (can't speak for Linux browsers). Anyway, it also takes the same time to download for viewing. So I abandoned that some while back.
4. Keeping the pictures on a server is one thing, but categorising them makes the whole thing a lot more useful. This suggests having a database on the backend. Not difficult to do but requires careful thought.
5. FWIW, my preferred solution is not to use a browser but to have a client-side application that manages the images it finds on your hard drive, processes them ready for viewing and upload, and interacts with a server-side application (using standard HTTP) to do the publishing for others to view. A minor advantage is your originals never go near the web server - some people are fussy about that kind of thing.
6. Naturally, I have a system half-built. If you are interested contact me off-list.
-- GT