Bluehost Hosting : Automatic Photo/Video Thumbnail Gallery?

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This is a bluehost question posted by metacollin on 30 June 2009

I have a smartphone (HTC Dream running Android, specifically) and I wanted to do something I thought would be relatively simple. I thought it would be neat to have a publicly accessible ‘mirror’ of all the photos and movies I take with my phone on a subdomain (phone.domain.com, for example).

On the phone side, I have it setup to automatically upload pictures and videos to a specific directory on my bluehost webspace via FTP. This works fine, but I don’t want to force friends to stare at an ugly directory listing. I set out to find an appropriate script, but have run into nothing but trouble.

Every script I’ve tried either fails to automatically load files from a directory, supports only photos, or cannot display thumbnails from videos.

gallery2 doesn’t automatically load files from a directory, and zenphoto can’t make thumbnails from the video. Gallery2 could, but it requires ffmpeg which isn’t supported on bluehost (too much CPU, though I think generating thumbnails once should be fine).

A gallery style script OR a blog-style posting script would be nice, it doesn’t matter to me.

I want:
1. Automatically add files when they are uploaded to a directory
2. Thumbnails for the pictures and videos (.3gp format)

OR

1. A 3rd party service that will convert videos to FLV (like youtube) and will automatically post them to some sort of XML-RPC enabled script, or something similar – the videos can either be uploaded to my webspace or remain remotely hosted. I can take care of automatic XML-RPC image posting myself.

Any ideas? This seems like a really simple problem, but solutions have proven difficult.

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