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Install Gallery, a free iTools gallery replacement UNIX
Gallery is a fantastic PHP-based software package that allows you to create your own online gallery, much like the iTools galleries (only better in my opinon). Gallery has a very active community with ongoing development. Rather than talk about it, visit their web site and make sure you take a look at what people are doing with Gallery software.

While this Gallery doesn't quite integrate with iPhoto in the same way as iTools does - its only a matter of time before someone figures it out. In the mean time you can export out of iPhoto and batch add to your online gallery.

Here's a brief tutorial on installing Gallery on OS X...

Install Gallery 1.3.1
  1. Create a directory for the downloads:
     % mkdir ~/InstallGallery
    % cd ~/InstallGallery
    Download the following files into that directory and expand them:
    Gallery 1.3.1
    NetPBM OS X
    EXIF extractor

  2. Using the Terminal, check to make sure the pre-built binary files (jhead and NetBPM) are executable:
     %chmod jhead 755
    % cd netpbm
    % chmod 755 *
  3. Move the jhead and Netpbm into /usr/local/sbin:
     % cd ~/InstallGallery
    % mv jhead netpbm/* /usr/local/bin
  4. Move the Gallery directory to your webserver directory (either ~/Sites or /Libarary/Webserver/Documents.

  5. Using the Terminal, execute the gallery configuration script (assuming location at /Library/Webserver/Documents):
     % cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/gallery
    % sh configure.sh
  6. Use your web browser, to go to the Gallery site on your machine to complete the installation: http://localhost/gallery. You should see a page that says "Start the configuration wizard". Click that link to begin the installation.
Gallery Setup Step 1
--------------------
A new page will appear "Gallery Setup: Step 1". This is a very nice page that checks all the required components (PHP, jhead, NtePBM, etc.) to make sure everything is installed properly. If everything looks good (no serious errors), then click the "Configure Gallery" at the bottom of the page to continue.

Gallery Setup Step 2
--------------------
A new page will appear "Gallery SetupL: Step 2". Most info will be filled in with all the proper values so there is not much to bother with here. One thing to consider is their recommendation to create a new directory called "Albums" in your webserver directory. The "Albums" folder is pretty much the main directory where all your pictures will go. According to their install, you would then have your gallery install spread across two directories in your webserver directory. I prefer to locate the "Albums" directory within the actual Gallery directory. Its up to you how you want to do it. Either way, create a directory "Albums" at /Library -> WebServer -> Documents or /Library -> WebServer -> Documents -> Gallery and change the preference on the Step 2 page (the one you are currently looking at) to indicate the proper path:
 % mkdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/gallery/albums
% chown www:www /Library/WebServer/Documents/gallery/albums
Fill in the admin password of your choice at the top. Fill in the Temprary Directory field on this page with "/tmp". Double-check the "Gallery URL" and "Album URL" fields. The rest of the options on this page can be left at their defaults. Click the "Album Defaults" button at the bottom of the page to continue.

Congratulations Page
--------------------
You should now see a "Congratulations" page. DO NOT CLICK THE "ENTER THE GALLERY" LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE YET!. In the terminal, type:
 % cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/gallery
% sh secure.sh
NOW you are ready to go to your gallery. Click the link that says "Enter Gallery" at the bottom of the page. You will be taken to a blank gallery page.

Click the "Login" link in the upper right corner and login with the username "admin" and the password you chose earlier.

Add galleries, upload photos, change preferences as desired.

Notes
  • The software makes extensive use of javascript and popup windows. A lot of people have disabled popup javascript windows for obvious reasons either via proxy setting (privoxy, etc), so you may need to tweak and disable some of those feature to access features within Gallery. If you click on the "Login" and you don't get a popup window that has a field for username and password then this is your problem.

  • There is an optional install called GalleryRemote that allows you to upload files and other tasks. It is written in Java and very beta at this point. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS INSTALL! I tried installing it and it locked my machine up twice - one during install and once when trying to use it. After the 2nd reboot I was unable to login to my user acct with my standard password. Not sure what the problem was but it was solved on a reboot again. BEWARE if you do try to use it.

  • Gallery integrates nicely with several CMS (Content Management Systems) like Geeklog, PHPNuke, and my personal favorite PHPWebsite.

  • Gallery can also be used to create your own online e-greeting site using software like Sendcard.
[Editor's note: If you haven't seen Gallery yet, it's definitely worth a visit! It has a great set of features and an easy to understand interface.]
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  You rated: 2 / 5 (2 votes cast)
 
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Install Gallery, a free iTools gallery replacement | 21 comments | Create New Account
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iPhoto albums
Authored by: mithras on Oct 31, '02 10:45:07AM

If you look at the directory "~/Pictures/iPhoto Library/Albums/", it contains folders with symlinks (not aliases) to each of the photos in your iPhoto albums.

If you make that folder world-readable, or readable to the group 'www', then I imagine you could coax Gallery to make use of it without a great deal of trouble.



[ Reply to This | # ]
iPhoto albums
Authored by: bluehz on Oct 31, '02 10:52:46AM

Yea - gettingthe iPhotos into the dir is not really that big a deal. The problem comes in that each time you upload a picture or bacth upload, gallery does a pretty complex process of extracting the EXIF (digital camera info), name, etc. and outputs this to the server (in the near future to a MySQL db). Basically it registers the new picture with the server. So just putting the files in a location for gallery will not work - it won't even see them. Since its written in PHP I am thinking it would probably be a fairly easy thing to parse the iPhoto dir if desired and grab all. I am not taht proficient in PHP though :(.



[ Reply to This | # ]
iPhoto albums
Authored by: eduo on Oct 31, '02 12:05:33PM

There is, indeed, some work other than just "point it at the directory" but it can be that easy as well.

Thing is, gallery parses directories and then inserts those pictures in the webserver's directories. It will always create a copy of the files, that's the way it works.

I have Gallery and have used it for a while, never crossed my mind publishing it as a hint:

http://ciateq.net.mx/~eduo/gallery/
http://eduo.hopto.org/gallery/

I can add this:

1.-In the add photos dialog you can actually upload not only files one-by-one, but you can also upload a zip or gzip or tar file containing all your files and the program, after upload, will parse your file and show you the contents. You can also put a URL for a remote page or image and it will parse that as well. Finally: You can put a full path in your machine (if the server resides there) pointing to an image or a directory and Gallery will parse the directory and add all the pictures in it (it will still copy them, tho'). If you can't put your path because you get errors (the web server does not run as root, so it may not be able to see every directory in the machine) make sure the whole path you're putting is accessible by every user (putting chmod 755 in every directory in the path does the trick). This may be a security risk, so you can also decide to move the pictures to /Library/WebServer/Documents/newdirectory and ask Gallery to look for it there. I have added batches of hundreds of photos freshly taken from the camera this way (pointing to the directory within my pictures folder where I saved them from Image capture, I wouldn't touch iPhoto with a ten-foot pole)
2.-The program can also place movies in the gallery, although it'll use a generic thumbnail for them. mov and mpg work perfectly.
3.-The binaries required by gallery can easily be installed through Fink if you already have it. Those that aren't available (like jhead) compile without special tweaking in the mac (Jaguar, at least)
4.-The Gallery lists are very active and the developers are eager to help. If there is someone proficient with Java help can be lent to the Gallery Remote for better compatibility on the mac (A cocoa Java app anyone?).
5.-In the gallery website there are perl tools for converting folder into albums from the command line. You can supposedly have a folder full of directories and images and the perl tools can convert all of that to albums. I have never used these tools, tho'.
6.-Gallery can use both imagemagick and netpbm and will actually check for both. You need to have only one, tho'. The better one is netpbm but YMMV.

Eduo



[ Reply to This | # ]
iPhoto albums
Authored by: bluehz on Oct 31, '02 12:43:47PM

Do you know exactly where that perl scriptyou are talking about is? Seems like I saw it the other day on the Gallery site, but the link was dead. Then I just tried to find it again atteh Gallery site and I can not seem to locate it. It could be a solution to iPhoto integration.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Gallery Software...
Authored by: wOOge on Oct 31, '02 10:54:16AM

This is AWESOME software, once you wrap your head around it (which is not difficult ) it's a fantastic and easy to use tool!! With a little modification, you can even make you own theme for it!!

I've used this software for the past 8 months and have not looked back!!

It's worth the time and effort, if you want to share your photos with your closest peeps, or the world!!



[ Reply to This | # ]
if you want to publish photos, you want Gallery
Authored by: Jay D on Oct 31, '02 11:21:51AM
Hate to submit to the "me too!" kind of posts, but this package is really fantastic. It works great right out of the box, but can be heavily customized with relative ease.

I have to agree with the poster that Gallery Remote is sort of a mess, so the only downside to Gallery is having to use an irritating form to add photos. However, you can get around it cleverly by using the "upload any images from this location" feature in the "add photos" section. Just make a directory in your web hierarchy (i.e. ~/Sites/tmp/), shove some photos in it and use the url http://yourcomputer.local/~youruser/tmp/ (or whatever), and Gallery will find and upload the photos. It's less of a pain than clicking endlessly to add many photos.

[ Reply to This | # ]

martin's Photo Frame
Authored by: kerim on Oct 31, '02 11:28:23AM
I personally prefer the simpler interface of this program: http://photoframe.sourceforge.net/

[ Reply to This | # ]
martin's Photo Frame
Authored by: edalzell on Oct 31, '02 02:06:55PM
The linked URL just points back to this forum topic. Here is the correct link:

http://photoframe.sourceforge.net

[ Reply to This | # ]

Photo Frame
Authored by: kerim on Nov 01, '02 10:46:28AM

Thanks for fixing that! Sorry.

Photo Frame is really wonderful, easy to use, and has a simple interface. It has been around for ages and continues to get updated. There is also excellent tech support. I haven't tried Gallery, but it looks like it is well suited to a multi-user site, but a little bit of overkill for your personal photo gallery.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Failed opening required 'errors/configure_instructions.php
Authored by: vineetb on Oct 31, '02 11:33:49AM

I am getting,

Fatal error: Failed opening required 'errors/configure_instructions.php' (include_path=''.'') in /Users/xxx/Sites/gallery/errors/configmode.php on line 10

Is that my PHP install problem?

How should I fix this?

I do have include_path='.' in /usr/local/lib/php.ini



[ Reply to This | # ]
Another
Authored by: raster on Oct 31, '02 11:41:26AM

Yes, Gallery is pretty nice, it has lots of room for improvement (templating, MySQL - I know, that's coming) but it does the job.

I installed it a while back on OS X, and it worked liked a charm. I also used it on FreeBSD and Linux.

Oh, I contributed the jhead binary for OS X, which wasn't very hard, it just needed gnumake instead of make. I actually made an installer pkg file, but never got around to distibuting it. If anyone would like to try the pkg install, let me know.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Also try cthumb if you don't have control of your server
Authored by: eduo on Oct 31, '02 12:22:22PM

If you have a static server (no PHP, not owned, not your machine, whatever) you may want to take a look at Cthumb, it's not dynamic (no click counts, no comments, no search) but does the thumbnail-and-display trick pretty well.

Cthumb is a perl script which relies in files called something.album which you configure telling the program what pictures conform each album, what theme it should use, size, layout, etc.

The good thing is that you run the script and you´re left with a directory full of images, thumbnails and HTML files you can then later upload to a website you may not have much control of (.mac anyone?)

http://cthumb.sourceforge.net/


Eduo



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Yeah Gallery kicks ass
Authored by: 47ronin on Oct 31, '02 04:19:30PM

Gallery is a GREAT replacement for .Mac, especially when paired with GeekLog (random photo blocks). Those two together really smoke the whole Photo Album / HomePage category of Apple's $99 .Mac ..Gallery and GeekLog are FREE and are much more flexible. Plus they install and run fine in Mac OS X



[ Reply to This | # ]
Yeah Gallery kicks ass
Authored by: bluehz on Oct 31, '02 07:50:12PM

I definitely agree - toss gallery into your CMS (I use phpwebsite) or integrate it with an e-greeting setup (like Sendcard) and you have something that in my opinion is much better and more customizable that iTools will ever be.



[ Reply to This | # ]
wNailer
Authored by: legacyb4 on Oct 31, '02 08:31:58PM

A favorite of mine is wnailer (www.vddh.com/wnailer).

PHP-driven, easy to use, and exactly what you want in a simple, upload-and-show scripted gallery system.

Cheers.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Sigh. What am I doing wrong?
Authored by: erictaub on Nov 02, '02 01:58:54PM

I've followed the instructions to the letter, and moved the gallery directory to my webserver/documents directory. But whenever I try to run the "setup wizard" I get a 500 error message. According to the log, it's something about a php command denied from the file .htpaccess. Well, I've tried chmodding that file, every file in the setup directory and gallery root to allow all to execute, and all to read/write. Doesn't seem to make a difference. And, yes, php is active. Oddly when I moved the gallery directory to my ~user/sites directory, it seemed to work much better. But I don't want gallery to live there! I even tried activating root and trying to install in /webserver/documents as the root user, and still no dice.

I'm frustrated and lost. Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated.

I upload LOTS of images -- I hope Gallery will let me create multi-thumbnail pages much like Better HTML Export from iPhoto does now, but perhaps more dynamically.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Sigh. What am I doing wrong?
Authored by: erictaub on Nov 02, '02 06:08:16PM

well, the httpd error log said that problem was with the .htaccess file, which contained php code. Got a message in the log "php not allowed here." Not sure what that means, or why it shouldn't be allowed, but I reneamed the file to .htaccess.bak, and now at least I'm at the setup screen. Let's see what happens now....



[ Reply to This | # ]
Now what?
Authored by: erictaub on Nov 04, '02 09:31:46AM

Well, I managed to get Gallery working correctly on my home network, behind my NAT router/hub. So far so good. It seems I had been using Apache Protect to password-protect my root Webserver/Documents directory, and Gallery didn't like it.

Now I've run into a more perplexing problem! When I try to access my Gallery pages from outside my NAT, I get an authentication dialog for a Websense realm on a server 11.48.6.239, whenever I try to display any of the graphics associated with creating Gallery pages (like the infamous transparent pixel). I can paste a URL into the browser which seems to be looking at an innocuous .GIF on my own server, and somehow I am required to log into this server I've never heard of!

Well, this has certainly been an education.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Welcome to Unix
Authored by: suberjc on Nov 04, '02 08:19:39AM

As an anal Unix administrator I should tell you not to look for any well written
Unix app to ask you where you want to put it. Unix user applications go in
/usr/local/bin.

Now in Windows you could put in c:\windows\system32 If that's what you wanted to do. But Unix,BSD,Linux are all REAL operating systems whith their own sense of where things should go.

Enjoy.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Finally got it working
Authored by: erictaub on Nov 05, '02 09:57:13AM

Well, it was an education in ways to screw things up, but now that I have Gallery running, I'm never going to look back to exporting static pages from iPhoto! And as much as I like many things about iPhoto, I've made the move to iView Media Pro, and I'm very happy with it. For one thing, it doesn't slow to a crawl when you have a few thousand images. Now if i could come up with a way to have IView comments exported with images to Gallery, I'd be a happy camper.



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Can I use this on my hosted site?
Authored by: chetript on Nov 08, '02 09:06:30PM

Ok, I have everything running fine on my local OSX machine. Just wondering if there's a way to run this from the server I have hosting my site. Obviously this machine is not on my local network and I don't have access to /usr/local/bin for the jhead file....and so on. I'm really new to this stuff so please speak slowly and in an unthreatening manner. :-)



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