The Photo Album Manager

Ted Ruegsegger

Why?

The best way to be sure you can find your pictures is to give them long, descriptive file names—modern computers let you use as many as 256 characters!

— Instructor for a Digital Photography class; a professional photographer still living in the information technology Dark Ages.

In fact, modern computers can do much better than that!

Even before I bought my first digital camera, when I was taking my film to the photo shop and coming home with the images on a CD, I realized I needed a system to manage large collections (so far, I'm averaging 11,000 photographs a year). Available packages didn't scale well or handle captions and other metadata. The nice features they have I could eventually add to this system, but I needed something quickly. Years later, I still like mine best.

Features

The Photo Album Manager (I know the name's lame—I'll gratefully consider any suggestions for a better one) is a comprehensive tool, using an industrial-quality database management system, for handling large numbers of digital images. With it, using your favorite web browser, you can

Import sets of photos, optionally including video files, with metadata, and maintain them in a database
Edit photo sets, adding, rotating or removing photos and updating metadata like location and description
Locate photos in your collection, searching by date range, location or text occurring in descriptions and captions
Make up descriptive tags and attach them to any photos you wish, and then carry out group operations on all photos with a particular tag
Assemble albums, selecting images from multiple photo sets and adding layout and captions
Write an album to a folder, suitable for burning to a CDROM or uploading to a static website
Administer the system, managing users and privileges

Multiple users can work independently and simultaneously.

Unprivileged users (anyone whose browser can see your server but who doesn't log in) can view photosets and albums (including downloading individual photos), but not edit them.

For each image, there is an original, a "web-sized" version for easy viewing in the browser, and a "thumbnail" for finding and selecting an image quickly. For published albums, you have the option of including or omitting the originals.

And it's all free.

Screenshots

Sample Albums

Documentation

Downloads

System Requirements

The Photo Album Manager runs as a service; users access it via a web browser. The host system must include:

A web server (I use, and recommend, Apache, preferably with SSL)
Web-server support for the PHP scripting language
The PostgreSQL database management system
The ImageMagick graphic tool collection
Support for Bourne shell scripts and tools like grep and sed
Adequate disk space to hold your collection. As a guide, 3-megapixel images average around 700KB with typical JPEG compression; 8Mpx images approach 3MB. 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 20,563 photos, mostly 3Mpx, took up about 14 GB.
Adequate RAM to support image processing without excessive swapping. It will work with less, of course, but more slowly; I recommend 256MB or more.

While it could undoubtedly be ported elsewhere, the obvious platform for this service is some flavor of GNU or Unix. Happily, most popular GNU/Linux or *BSD distributions can meet these requirements out-of-the-box with packages available on the installation medium.

Skill Requirements

Using the Photo Album Manager calls for nothing more than the ability to use a web browser and some way to transfer photos from your camera to your computer. If you want to edit the images, use your favorite photo editing tool; I recommend the GIMP (see Resources) . Use your favorite CD burner to record albums to CD, and your favorite file transfer tool to upload albums to a website.

The one-time installation, on the other hand, calls for some GNU or Unix system administration skills to set up the server and install the required packages. If you lack these, ask your local GNU/Linux or BSD user group for help.

Update: Since it makes sense to dedicate a computer for this purpose, I've developed an installer to make this as easy as possible. Have a look at my Easy Foto Box project. No system administration skills required!

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