Photos online!

The bang (exclamation point to some of you) is because I’ve been working on the photos section for quite a while. That’s because I was on a quest for the best photo-album software I could fine — or at least one that met my specs.

I went back and forth between photoblog software (geared toward new and unrelated photos being added daily), and photo album software (geared toward groups of related images).

I settled on photo album software, as I tend to think in categories.

Then I needed to find one that A) was free, 2) was templatable, and iii) had support for IPTC data.

IPTC, for those of you who haven’t read about it here or elsewhere, is the standard used by the world’s photojournalists to embed information about an image within the image. You don’t need a separate database holding things like the title and caption.

There are lots of galleries that let you add titles and captions, but most store that in a separate database, meaning you’re married to it if you want to keep your captions. So IPTC was a must.

The end result: zenphoto. (Had I gone the photoblog route, the clear winner was Pixelpost.)

While the "official" build doesn’t support IPTC, the community build does. "Huh?" you say? Zenphoto started as the work of one guy, but has been picked up by a community of coders. They’re working on the next version, and meanwhile you can get in-between versions that support IPTC from the nightly-build page.

I considered both Gallery and Coppermine, which I had experience with, but both were overloaded with features I didn’t need. (Further still, zenphoto integrates nicely with WordPress, which powers my site.)

So I installed zenphoto (10 minutes’ work), then set to creating a template that would keep the site’s look. That done, I went through all my photos, picked a bunch to put online, and uploaded them.

Zenphoto is great in that you can create a new album, say "dogs," by simply using FTP to upload a folder called "dogs" to the albums directory. The rest is automatic. So once my template was done, it was just a matter of uploading and going to get some dinner while 400MB of files were copied.

There’s still much more to do. While I might demand IPTC support, I haven’t added IPTC titles and captions to many of my photos. That’s a long-term job. But now, if I scan 50 old family photos, I can have them on display in a nice format in the time it takes to upload.

I love automation.

So thanks for reading all this. Now go take a gander at the unfinished gallery.