Photo Collection - A Web Picture Organizer
Copyright (C) 2000  Maan Bsat

This program 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 program 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 program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.

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Photo Collection
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Introduction
Requirements
Features
Help / Contact

*** For installation instructions, see the INSTALL file ***

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Introduction
-----

Photo Collection is my attempt at a picture organizer, for the
web. Pictures, along with their thumbnails, are stored in files,
together. They can be organized in categories, through a database. I
felt the need for such a software after I got my digital camera.

This software is written in PHP for the web server side, and there is a perl
client for managing the database.

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Requirements
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PHP
  Development and testing is now done on PHP 4.0.0. I have tested earlier
  versions of the software on PHP 3.0.x versions, and it was fine. I don't use
  any PHP 4.0 features, so all should be good.
  I use PHP as an apache module, so the CGI version has
  not been tested. PHP is available at http://www.php.net/.

A web server with PHP
  Again, my development and testing is done on Apache 1.3.12, but it should be
  fine with earlier versions. Also, as long as PHP runs fine, it should be OK
  with other web servers. Any experiences are welcome, please e-mail me. Apache
  is at http://www.apache.org/httpd.html.

MySQL
  All pictures and information are stored in a database, so this is vital. I
  use MySQL 3.22.32. Hopefully, other databases will be implemented. But in the
  meantime...sorry! Please e-mail me with any other experiences you have.
  You'll find MySQL at http://www.mysql.com/.

Perl
  The database management is done via a Perl script. Any fairly recent version
  should be OK. Perl is over at http://www.perl.com/.

DBI
  This is the database interface for Perl, so you need that along with the
  corresponding DBD module for MySQL. These can be found at
  http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/DBI/ and
  http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/DBD/.

ImageMagick and PerlMagick
  These are used in the perl script to scale images and to get some
  information. They're available at http://www.imagemagick.com/.

A computer???

The development and testing is done on Linux. However, if you get all the
components working on some other OS, it should work. Again, please e-mail me
with any exotic experiences!

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Features
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Hopefully, this software will provide an easily modifiable web page (through
templates) with the pictures stored as files, but all indexed in a database.
It should provide easy navigation between pictures and between categories.
Online, you can modify (name and comment) existing categories, and move,
delete, rename and add comments to pictures.
There are also plans for some kind of search on categories, picture names and
comments. There's also the hope of having some decent kind of user/password
authentication so that some collections are only available to some people/
groups. I'm still thinking about how to implement that, though. Any ideas are
welcome.

On the perl script side, it should provide an easy way of doing administrative
stuff. Mainly adding pictures and and categories, and maybe later move groups
of pictures around (in the different categories).


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Where to Call for Help / Contact Information
-----

Right now, I'm the only one who can provide any help. Maybe in the future,
there will be a mailing list...who knows?

I can be contacted at

Maan Bsat
mbsat@andrew.cmu.edu
http://photo.sourceforge.net/
