Setting Up a Dedicated Photo Album Manager Client and Server

Ted Ruegsegger

Overview
Recommended Hardware
Skill Requirements
Installing the Operating System
Installing the Photo Album Manager
Using the Photo Album Manager
What Else Can It Do?
License
Contacting the Author

Overview

The Photo Album Manager is a GPL application for managing large collections of photos and videos. Since it makes sense to dedicate a computer—real or virtual—for this purpose, I've developed an installer to make this as easy as possible:

Install an operating system on a bare machine
Install Photo Album Manager and all its supporting software, mostly automatically, from the Net.

The installer works with several operating systems:

Ubuntu

http://www.ubuntu.com/
Ubuntu (or one of its variants) is a good choice because:

It's popular and well-supported
It installs on most machines with a minimum of human assistance
It's easy to maintain (since it's a Debian derivative)

Ubuntu features the GNOME desktop environment; Kubuntu (http://www.kubuntu.org/) offers KDE and Xubuntu (http://www.xubuntu.org/) has the lightweight Xfce desktop environment, suitable for a machine with slower graphics or a machine that you use mainly as a server, or if you simply don't want all the hungry features in KDE or GNOME. The Photo Album Manager doesn't care what desktop environment you use. Tested for Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx", 9.10 "Karmic Koala", 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope", 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex", 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron", 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon", 7.04 "Feisty Fawn", 6.10 "Edgy Eft" and 6.06 LTS "Dapper Drake".

gNewSense

http://www.gnewsense.org/
This is a variant of Ubuntu that includes only Free software. It installs GNOME, but you can easily get KDE by installing the gNewSense-KDE CD instead or, if you've already installed the GNOME version, installing the kubuntu-desktop package. Similarly, you can get Xfce by installing xubuntu-desktop. Tested for versions 1.0/1.1 "deltad".

Debian stable

http://www.debian.org/
My standard for production servers. Doesn't have a live CD, but if you use Debian I'll assume you know one of the many ways to install it. In fact, you don't need to install a desktop environment at all if you just want it to be a server. Adjust the instructions according to your needs. Tested for versions 5.x "Lenny", 4.x "Etch" and 3.x "Sarge".

As these distributions release new versions, I'll endeavor to keep EasyFotoBox up-to-date. With luck, and perhaps some help from others, I'll add more to the list. If your favorite isn't in the list, chances are it will work if it's a Debian derivative (uses apt for package management).

Feel free to ignore the whole operating system issue, pick any of the above and just use the Photo Album Manager as an appliance.

Recommended Hardware

A machine to run the Photo Album Manager should have:

At least half a gigabyte of RAM
A CPU speed of at least a gigahertz
Adequate disk space for your anticipated photo collection. As a guide, 3-megapixel images average around 700 KB with typical JPEG compression; 8 Mpx images approach 3 MB. Video files are generally much larger. Compared to the images themselves, the software and the database take up trivial amounts of space. My collection of 30,772 photos, mostly 3 Mpx, took up about 22 GB, including the reduced "webpics" and thumbnails as well as the full-size originals.
A CD burner, though you could easily transfer a completed album to another machine that has one. As a minimum, you'll need a CDROM drive in order to install the operating system.
A network connection (the installer requires this to fetch required packages and the Photo Album Manager software).

I use a laptop with an AMD CPU at 1.7 GHz (claims equivalence to a Pentium at 2 GHz), 1 GB RAM, and an 80 GB disk (although 40 GB lasted me for a couple of years), since I use the laptop for other things as well. By today's standards, this is an old and lame machine, but it's easily adequate for my photo management and editing. I shoot mainly 3-megapixel photos; if you habitually use higher resolutions, adjust your specs upward.

Another option is to run Photo Album Manager in a virtual machine. I've tried this with both VirtualBox and VMware Server. This is handy if your main operating system won't run it or you simply wish to isolate it as an appliance.

If you expect to use a laptop as your primary client, make sure the display is good enough for photographs. Generally, I log into the laptop remotely from a machine with a nice, large monitor, but when I'm traveling I'm glad the laptop's own LCD screen is decent.

Skill Requirements

If I've done my job right, setting up a dedicated machine for the Photo Album Manager should be a simple matter of executing some install scripts. If you find any of the steps difficult or confusing, please let me know.

Installing the Operating System

Download the ISO CD image for the platform of your choice.
Burn it to a CD.
Boot the CD. The versions listed above combine the Live CD with the installer and will bring up a fully-operational desktop environment, running entirely in memory (and the CD), without touching your disk. You could spend some time playing with it, but it runs much faster when actually installed. Just click the Install icon on the desktop.
After some questions about language, timezone, etc, it will ask how you want to set up the disk. I recommend erasing the entire disk and using it all.
When prompted, create your personal account. I'll call that user account xyzzy in the remainder of these instructions.
The operating system installs quickly and easily. When it finishes, restart so it ejects the CD and boots the newly-installed system.

Installing the Photo Album Manager

Log in as xyzzy. In keeping with Ubuntu/Kubuntu tradition, we'll use sudo to carry out administrative tasks rather than messing with the superuser (root) account. In Debian, you'll simply get prompted for the root password as needed.
Open a terminal window:

Under KDE:

Select "Konsole Terminal Program" from the "K" menu at lower left, under "System".

Under GNOME:

Select "Terminal" from the Applications menu under "Accessories".

Under Xfce:

Select "Terminal" from the Applications menu under "System".

Under Debian, if you haven't installed a graphic desktop:

Well, you're already looking at a terminal, aren't you?
Download the installer by typing:
wget http://www.tux.org/~tbr/easyfotobox/install.sh
When the installer finishes downloading, execute it:
sh install.sh

It may ask you for your password (to carry out sudo operations); in any case, it will give you a long stream of progress messages. When it finishes, you'll have a working Photo Album Manager.

Avoid heartbreak: Don't lose your photo collection! If you don't already have some reliable backup system in place, set it up soon, making sure to back up the database properly as described in the Photo Album Manager User's Manual.

Using the Photo Album Manager

Upload Photos:

Got a camera memory full of photos? Make a subfolder under /home/public/photos/ and copy them into that. Ways to accomplish this include:

Connect the camera to the computer with a USB cable, open it in a folder and copy the images by drag-and-drop.
Insert the camera memory into a USB flash-memory reader plugged into your computer, open it in a folder and copy the images by drag-and-drop.
Most (all?) digital cameras store images to the flash memory in one or more subfolders under a "dcim" folder per the Digital Camera IMages specification. If your camera does that, chances are you can plug the memory into the reader and then, instead of opening the memory in a folder, just type fotoupload.sh (or, if you're connecting to the Photo Album Manager server from a remote client, type fotoxfer.sh myserver) and watch it detect the memory, create a unique folder name based on the date and time, upload all the images and then offer to erase the memory and unmount the device so you can remove it.
If your camera saves images in some other folder structure, let me know the details and I'll be happy to update the fotoupload.sh and fotoxfer.sh tools.

Don't have any photos handy but want to try it out? I have a small set of photos just for that purpose:

In a console window, type:
cd /home/public/photos
wget -rnH http://tbr.paunix.org/samplephotoset

Assemble the Photo Set:

Using a web browser, either Konqueror or FireFox:

Open https://localhost/foto/ (or, if you're browsing from another machine, open https://hostname/foto/ where hostname is the name or IP address of the machine running the Photo Album Manager).
You'll see the front page with a Login button near the top.

You'll need to accept cookies; a future release of Photo Album Manager may make that optional.
Click Login, then use the same username (what I've been calling xyzzy) and password you used to log in to the operating system.
The main menu appears, with lots of choices.
Select "Assemble a photo set from a folder of original photos".
From the drop-down menu, select the folder of photos you uploaded, either "samplephotoset" or the name generated by fotoupload.sh.
It displays the numbers and types of images and offers you some options; for now, let's take the defaults.
Click "Create Photo Set with Current Values".
It will cook for a while, displaying a progress bar and statistics, until the photo set is built. It refreshes every 60 seconds, but feel free to click "Refresh Now" if you're impatient.
When it's done, click "Edit this photo set"
…and there you are.

For more guidance, please refer to the Photo Album Manager documentation.

Variations

Since this is a web service, you can access it just as easily using a browser on another computer on the same network.
Just browse to https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/foto/ where the x's stand for the photo server's IP address (or name, if you have some sort of name resolution set up—I just use hosts files on each machine).
So can other people, at the same time. Handy for, say, a family organizing photos after a vacation.
You can give them all their own accounts.
Log in as admin to add accounts, change passwords, and do other administrative tasks.
The admin account starts with the same password as your account. You probably won't need the admin account for anything other than managing user accounts and granting them privileges. Avoid experimenting with it; admin has the power to break things.

What Else Can It Do?

As you've probably noticed, you now have a general-purpose platform, loaded with all sorts of interesting applications, many of which can be run right from the menus. You can install many more, using the Synaptic package-management tool provided. There's very little it can't do.

But that's not my purpose here, so I'll refer you to the websites for your chosen platform and the GNOME or KDE environments.

License

This collection of scripts and documentation is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This collection is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this collection; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Contacting the Author

Theodore B. Ruegsegger