Gallery Web Hosting

Gallery Web Hosting

The Gallery is an open source web based photo album organizer; and this tool offers easy management and publication of digital photographs and other media through a PHP enabled web browser. The application can be used for a small personal website or large community sites, as it offers a seamless integration of photo management into the user’s website. The primary goal of the Gallery open source project is to develop, enhance and support leading photo sharing web application solutions. This software is licensed under the GPL and the highly talented community members are behind the development and maintenance of this software. Gallery is completely free to download and use.

Gallery Requirements:
There are certain technical requirements that need to be met for Gallery 1.X and Gallery 2.X to run smoothly. Described below are the minimum requirements that need to be met before installing this software:

• Platform – UNIX (BSD, Linux,) or Windows
• Web Server: Apache, Microsoft IIS or Zeus
• PHP: PHP version 4.3.0 or greater (Gallery 1.x requires PHP 4.1.0 or greater). Please note that PHP safe_mode must be turned off.
• Image Processing Library: Gallery requires either ImageMagick or NetPBM to facilitate automatic generation of thumbnails and resized versions of photographs. Gallery 2 also supports GD and GraphicsMagick.
• Database: (For Gallery 2 only): MySQL 3.x, 4.x or 5.x, PostgreSQL 7.x or 8.x, Oracle 9i or 10g, DB2 8.2, MS SQL Server 2005 (Gallery 1.x does not require a database).

There are slight requirement variations for Gallery 1 and Gallery 2. Below is a brief overview of their respective technical requirements, before attempting to install either:
Gallery1:

• Platform: Gallery runs on both UNIX (including *BSD, Linux,) and Windows platforms. Users have not had a very good experience with Win98, WinME and IIS. Therefore, these platforms are not supported.
• RedHat 9.0 Users: Users need to verify their Apache and PHP versions, because by default. RedHat uses Apache 2 and PHP 4.2 which are incompatible.
• Apache: The Gallery team highly recommends Apache web server
• IIS: Microsoft’s IIS (Internet Information Services) web server is not supported by the Gallery team.
• Gallery 1.x should work on any web server that can run PHP. Gallery 1.x is known to work with: Zeus Web Server on Linux and HP-UX 11 and Yellow Tip Web Server on Windows NT, 200x and XP.

Optional requirements include:

• Mod_rewrite: This is an Apache server extension that enables your Gallery to use “short URLs.
• Jhead: This is a free tool that can be used to extract EXIF data from images, which most digital cameras now add to photos.
• Exiftags: An alternative tool to jhead; exiftags parse a specified JPEG file or, by default, its standard input, looking for a JPEG APP1 section containing EXIF (Exchangeable Image File) image metadata.
• Infozip: This is a free tool that allows Gallery to unzip ZIP archives so that users can easily upload multiple photos.
• Jpegtran: This free tool that allows Gallery to rotate JPEG images; without risking degradation.

Gallery 2:

• The Gallery team highly recommends the Apache 1 and Apache 2 web server for Gallery2 version.
• IIS: Although IIS works well with Gallery2, few compatibility issues have been reported in the past. Short URLs work, but G1 redirects are not yet supported for IIS.
• G2 should work on any web server that can run PHP. But short URLs / G1 redirects (URL rewrite module) probably do not work with all of them.
• Gallery 2 will not run well with PHP 5.0.5 due to a bug in PHP. PHP5 is highly recommended. The Gallery 2.4 version which is due in 2008 will require PHP 5.2 or later. PHP 6 is incompatible with Gallery 2.0 – 2.3. Gallery 2.4 (first release in 2008) is planned to be compatible with PHP 6.
• Gallery 2 requires one of the following database management systems (DBMS): MySQL 3.x or 4.x, 5.x, PostgreSQL 7.x, 8.x, Oracle 9i or 10g, IBM DB2 8.2, Microsoft SQL Server.
• Gallery 2 requires either NetPBM 9.x or newer, ImageMagick 4.x or newer, GD 2.x or newer, or GraphicsMagick 1.x or newer.

Optional Requirements:

• Mod_rewrite
• Ffmpeg: This module facilitates the automatic creation of thumbnails for movies. The ffmpeg module requires the ffmpeg binary.
• Dcraw: Dcraw is a graphics toolkit that can be used to process RAW images produced by high end digital cameras.
• Jhead: used to extract EXIF data from images, which most digital cameras now add to photos.
• Infozip
• Zip/unzip: zip is required for the zip download module and unzip for the archive upload module. Most Linux / UNIX based platforms already possess these binaries.

This feature rich software offers ample utilizable tools to further enhance and enrich user experience. Described below is a brief summary of some of the key features of Gallery:
Administration:
Installation and Configuration Wizard:
This wizard helps users to make certain that their web server and operating systems are set up correctly. Following features can be easily customized with the configuration wizard:

• Image Magick or NetPBM: This feature offers an option to choose the image manipulation package.
• Auto Rotate Images: Ability to accrue information from pictures of a digital camera and automatically rotate them as needed.
• Image Quality and Size Defaults: Option of limiting the quality and size of the selected images to be uploaded and thereby save space.
• Main Gallery Page Settings: Ability to customize settings or how the main Gallery page looks and acts including showing or hiding the album tree, search engine, or album owner, and what frames to show around albums.
• Optional Binaries: zip, jhead, jpegtran: These programs ensure better functioning and enhance the software’s flexibility.
• Languages: Ability to choose which languages the user wants in Gallery to support and how the user is presented with the choice.
• Email Support: This feature facilitates sending emails to Gallery users upon creation of their accounts or when they forget their passwords, email people when the Gallery is updated, and more.
• Gallery-wide slideshow: enable or disable a slideshow that includes all pictures in the gallery
• Commenting: Ability to turn on/off the public commenting system and configure it.
• Logging: enable logging with syslog or the Windows logger
• RSS publishing: Ability to publish Gallery with RSS![1]
• Album Defaults: Ability to set defaults for the way that all new albums will originally look

Accounts and Permissions:
The administrator needs to log in as Admin; and this account enables the admin to create other users (which can also be administrators). Users can be granted permission to create and maintain their own albums on a per-album basis, users can register themselves and sign up for email notifications.
Albums: The albums can be populated inside of each other and then customized one by one. Specific permissions can be set for albums (i.e., some users can modify it, some users can add to it, etc), and the album owner can grant permissions to different users. Albums can even be hidden to only allow logged in or specific users access.
Items in an album can be sorted based on date added, date captured, etc, and the whole album can be deleted, moved, or renamed. Polling can also be enabled for albums and the results can be optionally displayed. Album can also be easily watermarked and customized. It offers ample flexibility in terms of changing the title, colors, background, fonts, and borders.
PHOTOS: Upon uploading pictures, they get automatically thumbnailed, added to the album and have intermediate sized images created if needed. The photo management features include:

• Edit the title, caption, keywords, and other custom fields that need to be defined.
• Ability to modify the thumbnail with java applet, selecting only part of the image to show.
• Ability to rotate the image in increments of 90 degrees.
• Move the photo to a different place in the same album or a different album.
• Hide the photo so that only the album owner or logged in users can see it.
• Delete the photo.
• Ability to add a watermark of personal choice to the photo.

Mirroring Albums:
Gallery allows mirroring of albums on as many remote servers as desired.
Connecting:

• Gallery Remote is a java program that will run on any system that java will run on. Users can use it upload photos to Gallery via a drag-and-drop interface.
• Other methods are also available to add pictures to Gallery including ones that support Windows XP, Apple’s iPhoto, Mobile Phones, perl, python, and more.
• RSS can be used to publish Gallery and updates to it.

Embedding:
Gallery can be embedded in several different content management systems, here are the current ones that are supported:

• Nuke 5.0+
• NSN-nuke
• Post-nuke
• Geek Log
• phpBB2
• Mambo

Customizing: The software is extremely customizable and flexible. Following are the four main ways to customize Gallery:

• CSS – Modify Gallery’s style sheets, use existing site’s style sheet, or write your own to control colors, borders, spacing.
• Themes: Gallery is equipped with ample themes to choose from.
• html_wrap – Ability to include content above, below, to the left, and to the right of gallery to make it blend in with the rest of the site.
• Changing code: Since Gallery is open source; user can easily modify or change the source code to make it do whatever they want it to do.

Visitor Experience: Users viewing the album can easily navigate around using the navigation bars at the top and bottom of every album page. The album owner can allow the user to use the following features:

• Languages: Gallery currently supports over 30 languages and the language can be easily detected by Gallery from the user’s browser configuration, or the user can be presented with a drop down box or pictures of flags to select a language.
• Unique and short urls: If the server supports mod_rewrite (a module for Apache), the albums can easily have short, easy to remember urls.
• Fit to window images: Gallery can dynamically resize images.
• Option of choosing full or resized images.
• Print photo option
• Keyword Searching option: Visitors can search a gallery for text in Picture and Album descriptions and optional fields.
• EXIF Headers
• Click counting feature: Gallery keeps track of how many times albums and pictures are viewed and displayed.
• Public commenting feature.
• Polling option
• Album Tree: A tree of all albums and sub albums with clickable links to them can be displayed on the front page of Gallery.

The following hosts offer complete and confirmed compatibility with Gallery 1.x and 2.x:

• PowWeb
• DreamHost
• VistaPages
• ThinkHost
• OpenSourceHost
• Delphian Internet
• HostGo
• Cirtex Hosting

The Gallery team supports the pen source forum for software development. It is only the affiliate fee that helps Gallery to cover the incurred costs.