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| Over the past few years I've taken some snapshots of the family. My Dad's a very competent photgrapher; he's grabbed some amazing candids of people for many years. Me, I just point'n'shoot. I thought it would be fun to put some of these photos online, although they're probably boring for everyone but the people in them. Being a software enthusiast I thought that I'd look around for an open source photo album package. I didn't have to look far, although I did end up looking pretty widely at the category. Which leads to: <rant> | ||||||||
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| < < | This category of software is a pretty good example of "just because you can - doesn't mean you should." In other words, there are far too many of these programs (current count: 43) and almost all of them are more-or-less the same. The problem is that there are so many that it becomes difficult to pick a good one without wasting time wading through 3 or 4 (or 15 or 20) that are a complete waste of everybody's time. | |||||||
| > > | This category of software is a pretty good example of "just because you can - doesn't mean you should." In other words, there are far too many of these programs (current count: 44) and almost all of them are more-or-less the same. The problem is that there are so many that it becomes difficult to pick a good one without wasting time wading through 3 or 4 (or 15 or 20) that are a complete waste of everybody's time. | |||||||
| I know I shouldn't rag on people for trying to do the right thing, but in this case I think people are actually hurting the open source community by releasing yet another half-baked project which will suck resources that might be better focussed on one or two that have a chance to become decent. | ||||||||
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| perl, mostly static but with a CGI for some reason or other. Has a daemon which you can run to update the site automatically (if you don't know how to use cron). | ||||||||
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| < < | the gallery - version 1.1 as of 2001-07-07 http://www.menalto.com/projects/gallery/index.php | |||||||
| > > | the gallery - version 1.4.2 as of 2004-02-04 http://gallery.menalto.com/ | |||||||
| Dynamic PHP, lots of features. Rather pretentious name since there are at least 4 other packages that have "gallery" in the name. | ||||||||
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| Yeah, right. | ||||||||
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| > > | My Pictures - version 2004-02-02 http://www.splitbrain.org/Programming/PHP/mypictures/index.php Dynamic PHP, looks like a file browser interface. Has a good idea of storing comments as JFIF metadata inside the images themselves. Agrees with my FightEntropy goal. | |||||||
| album - version 2.11 as of 2001-06-26 http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/album/ Static perl, has themes. I've tried this one and it works well. It doesn't depend on funky software, the themes are easy to hack and it doesn't require strange data files for it to run (just point it at a directory full of jpg files). | ||||||||
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Put-up or shut-up time | ||||||||
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| < < | OK, so what did I end up doing? After bouncing around and trying a bunch of packages, I found that album seems to work well. I didn't want to have to maintain a separate software system just to show photos, though, so in the end I worked out a fairly simple hack to TWiki (the system that serves these pages) to allow it to handle photo albums reasonably well. I like to think that this underscores my original point, which is that for most common tasks there's already a program to automate it, and it's better to enhance someone else's software than create an entirely new program, even if you think it would be better than the other guy's. | |||||||
| > > | OK, so what did I end up doing? After bouncing around and trying a bunch of packages, I found that album seems to work well. I didn't want to have to maintain a separate software system just to show photos, though, so in the end I worked out a fairly simple hack to TWiki (the system that serves these pages) to allow it to handle photo albums reasonably well. I like to think that this underscores my original point, which is that for most common tasks there's already a program to automate it, and it's better to enhance someone else's software than create an entirely new program, even if you think it would be better than the other guy's. | |||||||
| If you're a fan of TWiki you can get the photo album hack at: http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/TWikiPhotoAlbum | ||||||||
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| < < | -- TobyCabot - 14 Jun 2001 - 25 Feb 2002 | |||||||
| > > | -- TobyCabot - 14 Jun 2001 - 04 Feb 2004 | |||||||