My eternal Photo Album problem

bartalzo · 2006-01-07 02:35:34

Hi all,

I am a newbie to Textpattern, and I’ve been riding these forum pages for a while now. So far I found Textpattern very good, I have the webspace, I have a working TxP installation, but I think I’m slowly loosing hope that I will ever be able to import my photos from http://www.zoltan.tk into a decent gallery powered by TxP. Yet, my requirements are quite simple. I would like to have a new TxP section where:

(1) i have a photo album for each trip that I make. Albums should be displayed either chronologically (when the trip was made) or by an alphabetic list of the visited countries
(2) each album should be able to have a short description, its own list of thumbnails with their description and/or hold sub-albums
(3) each photo should be commentable and support EXIF information
(4) batch import of images should be possible (i have hundreds of photos ready and waiting in a folder structure)
(5) SQL and ImageMagick are ok, even recommended
(6) photos should accept keywords like “winter”, “black and white”, etc
(7) the photo descriptions and comments should be searchable with the TxP search.

Additionally, I would like to:

(8) display articles about the newest albums in another TxP section
(9) have links to the most recent photos, the photos with the most comments, etc.

Is that much to ask?

I know there are lots of PHP+SQL-based galleries outthere, but I would like to have the above in one and the same control panel within TxP. I also know about the external-hosting plugins a la Flickr, but I want my photos on my own webspace. I am also willing to do a bit of PHP-hacking, although I’m a newbie even there.

Any ideas and hints are very welcome!

- Zoltan, Vienna/Austria -

Last edited by bartalzo (2006-01-07 02:40:15)

marknumberm · 2006-01-07 06:41:38

Well, those are some very specific requirements.

It sounds to me as though you’d have to start by making one photo per txp article. I think that’s the only way you’re going to be able to get comments and keywords available on each photo. It would also enable searchability (your #7).

Each album (trip) could then be either a section or a category. And you’d have a page template containing an <txp:article_custom /> tag with either the
section="section name" or category="category name" attribute.

On the batch import thing, I’m not sure, but it sounds as though you could use an FTP client. I recommend Filezilla because it’s free and works very well.

I have no idea what this means: “SQL and ImageMagick are ok, even recommended.” Maybe someone else can help.

Numbers 8 and 9 would be no problem. You should be able to figure them out by reading available documentation.

matt7530 · 2006-01-08 01:35:56

I can help get you started with a few of your items:

—-
(1) i have a photo album for each trip that I make. Albums should be displayed either chronologically (when the trip was made) or by an alphabetic list of the visited countries
(2) each album should be able to have a short description, its own list of thumbnails with their description and/or hold sub-albums
(3) each photo should be commentable and support EXIF information
(4) batch import of images should be possible (i have hundreds of photos ready and waiting in a folder structure)
—-

To fulfill these requirements, I’d create an Album section and a Photo section. Albums should be articles in the album section to allow for easy listing and sorting and albums should also be categories to allow for easy photo organization. Photos should be articles in their own section assigned to their respective categories.

Then you need to setup article links so that they have the category in the link e.g. /Album/London/15/London which will allow you to use the ‘if category’ statement (you can do this with the ‘zem_rewrite’ plugin). After your Album article is displayed you would need to setup a conditional ‘if category’ statement to display a thumbnail list of the photos from that Album using ‘article custom’ and specifying the Photo section and the correct category. Photo thumnails would of course link back to the Photo section.

Unfortunately, there is no textpattern plugin which automatically reads and displays EXIF data for a particular photo, however, I think there may be one which helps import it… I’d do a search for ‘exif’ & ‘import’.

Good luck on the rest of the items. Let me know if you have any questions….

Also, you can visit my Photo Gallery to preview many of the solutions I mentioned above.

Last edited by matt7530 (2006-01-08 01:39:59)

ruminator · 2006-01-08 18:25:42

Matt, that’s a sweet site and a great design!

matt7530 · 2006-01-10 00:26:31

Thanks!

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#1 2006-01-07 02:35:34

My eternal Photo Album problem

#2 2006-01-07 06:41:38

Re: My eternal Photo Album problem

#3 2006-01-08 01:35:56

Re: My eternal Photo Album problem

#4 2006-01-08 18:25:42

Re: My eternal Photo Album problem

#5 2006-01-10 00:26:31

Re: My eternal Photo Album problem

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