So recently I broke my photo gallery (no link because I expect to change the URL v.Soon), and while I was fixing it, I noticed that PHPix2 was spewing lots of errors into my apache logs. Not a good thing. Also have to use register globals. Also not a good thing.

Recently beez referred me to qdig, which is an interesting and fairly slick photo gallery and it’s still under active development (unlike PHPix.) That said, it’s not done yet. One of the biggest things I’m missing in it is a straight-up contact sheet. Qdig likes to show a photo and a smattering of thumbnails below… and while they’ve added the contact sheet option for galleries with greater-than $x photos, it’s only in the develment releases and it doesn’t seem to work yet.

So I’m sticking with PHPix for now.

But it got me thinking about what I want in a photo gallery package:

• raw filesystem upload (using (S)FTP to add photos, and not plugging each one into a form like commercial web-services)
• does not touch the original files (treats photo-tree as read-only)
• automatic thumbnailling and image resizing (some software you have to manually trigger that)
• captioning/descriptions editable via web form, text file or DB (utilize Exif? But it can’t write back to the file!)
• apply rotations as per the above method?
• dirctories-as-albums, and subdirectories-as-sub-albums
• virtual albums (an aggregate collection of photos from other albums, must be DB/txt/xml backed)
• trackbacks/pingbacks, so one can see a ‘blog entry about a photo or album

I beleive that the last item, trackbacks, would be gold. I tell stories in my ‘blog, not in my photo gallery – therefore a photo is part of a story, but an album might not be.
So I think I might start hacking something to support some of these features. But where to start?

• Qdig is meant for simplicity of install & setup, but it’s management is a little obtuse (what does admin.php do other than create directories??)
• PHPix (1, 2 or 3) development is dead as far as I can tell. It also needs a serious clean-up anyway.
• Gallery, I just don’t like. (And it’s MySQL-backed. Yuck)
• Exhibit Engine is slick (and the demo gallery shows some real talent), but it’s also MySQL-backed, and just doesn’t have the right feel for what I want
• DAlbum is neat too, clean photo-viewer, but very busy in every other screen. I’m not looking for a portal, just photos, a bit of text and references

I think Qdig is going to win here. I may have to split up some of it’s functionality, but because the features I want aren’t mature yet (primarily the contact-sheet-view-only), I’m either going to have to wait, fix it myself, or use something mature – like PHPix. ‘Course I’ve been reading that some versions of PHPix are insecure in that they let you peruse more than just the photo-album on the filesystem. Eep.

Has anyone else been working on something like this? Or is this so over-the-top to be a ridiculous idea? More to the point – does anyone want to help me work on this?