Coppermine Photo Gallery Web Hosting

Coppermine Photo Gallery Web Hosting

Coppermine Photo Gallery is a photo gallery web application packed with multimedia features and requires PHP, MySQL, and ImageMagick or the GD Graphics Library. It functions well with most of the web server software such as Apache. This web picture gallery is essentially multi purpose, advanced, user-friendly and a feature rich software, which available free of cost to download. Coppermine Photo Gallery has interfaces with many popular software packages, including e107, Invision Power Board, Joomla, Mambo, phpBB, PostNuke, PunBB, Simple Machines Forum, vBulletin, Woltlab Burning Board, and YaBB SE.

Coppermine Photo Gallery is an open source software and is licensed under the GNU General Public License and was originally created by Grégory DEMAR. The gallery can be set for private access, accessible to registered users only and/or open to all website visitors. According to permission settings, users can easily upload pictures with their web browser, rate pictures, add comments and even send e-cards. The site administrator wields complete control over these features and option settings. Furthermore, the site administrator can also manage galleries and batch process large numbers of pictures that have been uploaded onto the server by FTP. The image files are typically stored in albums, the albums are in turn grouped into specific categories and these categories are can be further categorized under the parent category, or as desired by the user. If permitted; users may also upload to public albums. The administrator also determines whether or not to grant permissions to create albums; upload or delete files etc. Coppermine has an optional user selectable theme system with a number of themes pre-installed. The software comprises of its own language library and supports multiple languages. Coppermine uses PHP, a MySQL database, and either the GD library (version 1.x or 2.x) or ImageMagick to generate and keep records and file information of all thumbnails, intermediate, and full-sized images. Coppermine generates the html code necessary to display its various categories, sub-categories, albums, intermediate, and full-sized image displays dynamically.
The following minimum requirements need to be met for Coppermine to function smoothly:

• A web server that supports PHP: PHP (version 4.2.0 or better), either compiled with the support for the GD library or permission to use the exec() function for the ImageMagick “convert” utility in order to make thumbnails and reduced size images. Mysql support needs to be compiled into PHP as well.
• A MySQL database: MySQL version 3.23.23 or better is required. MySQL 4.1 is recommended and MySQL 5 is supported. The MySQL user needs permissions to perform CREATE, ALTER, REPLACE, SELECT, UPDATE, DELETE, INSERT data from the database.
• An Image Library: Either GD version 1.x or 2.x (PHP has to be compiled to support it) or ImageMagick.
• It is highly recommended that the user first contact the web hosting service before installing Coppermine to lap up on all information and make certain if there are any issues involved in installing Coppermine.
• Also; Coppermine has been successfully tested on IS, Apache 1.3.24 onwards to the latest Apache 2, on Linux, UNIX, OSX, and Win32 systems. (Coppermine highly recommends Apache).

This feature rich software is still evolving to enrich user experience and offers extreme flexibility and loads of utilizable user friendly features:

• Arrangement of pictures in categories and albums
• Picture information stored in database
• Users can upload pictures with web interface of ftp (and admin can batch-add to database)
• Full multimedia support
• Creation of thumbnails and intermediate size pictures
• Search feature available
• Last added feature
• Random picture view
• User management (private galleries, groups)
• Integration of user management with various bbs (like phpBB, YaBB SE, SMF, Invisionboard, vbulletin)
• Caption, title, description and user defined fields for each picture (searchable)
• Easy install feature (Installer is provided).

Multi lingual: Arabian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (both Big-5 and GB), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German (both “Du” and “Sie”), Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian (both with and without diacritics), Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Uighur, Vietnamese; if the user’s language is not on the list, he/she can easily create a translation for their own language.

• User comments
• E-card feature
• Slideshow viewer
• All features are easily customizable with web interface (located in the admin section)
• Template system
• User membership in multiple groups
• Option of uploading approval notice for admin
• EXIF/IPTC support
• Language election option in template
• Image rotation
• Multiple pictures can be uploaded. Separation of the breadcrumb block so that it can be placed independently of category in the template.
• Option to choose max height or width for thumbnails will help in creating neat looking thumbnail rows and cols.
• Option to display a clickable filmstrip of thumbnails below the image display
• Option to show first level albums of a category instead of just statistics of the category.
• Option of turning on OR off the showing of “Private” Icon to un-logged / unprivileged user.
• Title option to sort in albums.
• Online help feature for the admin pages
• Plug-in – API.
• English as a fallback language for un-translated entries in language files
• Password protected albums
• More admin-settable user profile fields
• Picture resize on upload
• BBS integration settable with a wizard-like user interface
• Advanced search (boolean operators)

The new and forthcoming release of Coppermine may include these additional features as well:

• Integration of various hacks/user contributions into the release package
• Advanced e-card feature (plain-text mails)
• Template building tutorial
• Optional dhtml navigation
• Permanent URLs for search engine friendliness (using PID instead of POS)
• Rating on thumbnails page
• Registration disclaimer optional
• From thumbnail to Pop-Up option
• Coppermine API
• Comment approval
• Comment and registration captcha class
• Global password for registration
• Watermarking
• Thumb cropping and sharpening
• Movie download option
• E-card flash support available
• Random album thumbnail
• Tag cloud for keywords
• Moderator for album pictures

Since Coppermine is licensed free of charge; there is available warranty for the program. Also, it is important for users to note that ImageMagick will not work properly if PHP on their server is running in SAFE mode and it can be fairly difficult to get it running under Windows. Therefore, it is advisable to use GD in such cases.