Photos and the WWW

I've frustrated for a while by the lack of an easy way to put my digital photos on the WWW. There seem to be an abundance of tools (free and commercial) that claim to do that sort of thing, but none of them ever seemed to do what I wanted. So I did nothing ...

Then I discovered Photo Frame and EdJPGcom (both free!) and it's now easy ...

http://photoframe.sourceforge.net/

http://home.cfl.rr.com/maderik/edjpgcom/

With PhotoFrame, you just dump a copy of a file "index.php" into a Web-accessible directory full of JPGs (and some other image types -- dunno the details, I have JPGs) and magic happens. There are some parameters you can tweak (e.g. auto resizing) and it all happens by magic.

And if you want to do some more serious fiddling, the source is there and you can do what you like with it. Anyhow, take a look at my first effort:

http://www.chapelhill.homeip.net/FamilyHistory/Photos/Nundah-cemetery-Brisbane/

and see for yourself. If I have a criticism, it is the fact that the slideshow option only appears after you click on one of the thumbnails. I'd like it to display immediately on visiting the page.

EdJPGcom is a Windows tool that you can "plug-in" so that it applies to all JPG files and allows you to easily caption them by inserting the caption into the JPG file (in the comment area), which is where (by default) PhotoFrame looks for the caption (but it supports other options). This is great because the caption then remains with the file for eternity. Most album tools seem to delight in storing the captions in some other mysterious database and the moment you migrate to some other tool, poof, your captions are gone!

Before I go bezerk here with my new-found enthuasiasm, I should stress that these tools don't help you organise Albums, but so long as you (or your tool) are using the paradigm of one directory/folder of files per Album, then integrating your current arrangements with Photo Frame should be quite straightforward.

Probably the biggest barrier to the use of PhotoFrame is the availability of PHP and one of a selection of image tools it uses for tasks like making thumbnails (e.g. gd or imagemagik) in your WWW server. In our case, our Apache server came out of the box (Linux Redhat, Fedora?) with PHP and gd installed, so it was very easy. But for most people, WWW-hosting is done by a third party like your ISP and you are limited by their choices in this regard.