phTagr

phTagr joined the OpenShare network which is the first free banner exchange service targeted at open and free source project. The idea is great but simple: You advertise other open source projects – the others advertise your project.

phTagr needs reputation and/or publicity – OpenShare seems to be a fair and great opertunity. Thank you OpenShare and good luck for your idea!

PS: If you know another way how to promote this great project, please speak up!

I was just curious if phtagr runs fine on a free web hoster. And yes – it does and does a great job! This entry shows how you can setup your own photo web gallery – totally for free!

I chose the free hoster megabyet.net which comes with

• Spam and ads free
• 1,6 GB free storage
• PHP
• MySql database

… so all I need for running the gallery.

I signup at http://megabyet.com/signup.php for the free account, entered my new domain (of cause I choose the name phtagr), entered my name, email, and address. Then a captcha – success, I am human. After a few seconds I received an confirmation email with my new web space, username, password for the cPanel, and FTP.

Signup for a free web space at megabyet.net

So login to cPanel  for creating a mysql database – called phtagr, which becomes phtagrme_phtagr.

cPanel of megabyet.net

Successfull creation of a MySQL database

In the meanwhile I downloaded the latest phtagr source (r505) and extracted it locally. After doing that I was uploading it via FTP (FileZilla) the provided www directory of my new webspace.

Upload phtagr via FTP with FileZilla

Now its time to setup the new gallery! I opend the setup page of http://phtagr.megabyet.net/setup and followed the instructions. Everything worked fine. The connection to the database and the admin user creation had no problems.

Setup welcome screen

Setup of database connection

Setup of admin account

I skipped these optional step

As test images I used the screenshots which I did so far. I zipped them, uploaded the zip archive and imported the files after successful upload. Now it was time for some tagging.

Successful upload and extraction of the zip archive

Some tagging within the photo explorer

The startup page of phtagr

I wanted also to geo tag some images so I created a new google maps key (you need a google account for it) for the gallery URL http://phtagr.megabyet.net. The key was entered in the System -> Commands and now I was able to geo tag, too!

Entering the new key for google maps

Geotagging with google maps

And as last test I did a WebDAV connection with cadaver to http://phtagr.megabyet.net/webdav. That worked, too!

WebDAV connection to my gallery files

So all in all it made lots of fun seeing this great gallery running on a free web hoster. You can upload your photos, tag them – also with geo location, see your images in the build-in slideshow, add other users with there upload quota, etc.

When do you install your own phTagr?

You can see all screenshots at the demo page or some screenhost at megabyet.net.

PS: What does not worked well was an initial setup at byethost.com where the database connection was not working for some reasons. Also the sending of email did not work out of the box at megabyet.net.

I am happy to announce with revision r505 that the software requirements are finally reduced to a minimum! phTagr requires now only a basic LAMP:

• Webserver (tested with Apache)
• PHP (tested with PHP5)
• GD or ImageMagick
• database engine (tested with mysql)

This change improves and simplifies the initial steps to run this great gallery! Further, the installation documentation was updated and improved.

exiftool and ffmpeg are no longer required to run the basic operations. Further the dependend PEAR libraries are now included into the software. The new version could be downloaded as  ZIP archive or TAR ball – happy  testing.

Without exiftool the meta data like tags, categories or geo location are imported from photos but not be written back to them. Without ffmpeg only flash movies could be imported. If you have ffmpeg other video formats are supported and the videos are automatically converted from AVI, MPEG or MOV to the flash file format. ffmpeg also creates the a video preview. If now preview exists a default image is shown.

I am proud to release version 2.1. The new version comes with lots of features, improvements and bug fixes. It looks better, is more sexy and it rocks!

New since v2.0:

• User comments with email notifications
• Geo Tagging (via Google Maps)
• HTML upload with extracting zip archives
• Build in slideshow via PicLens light
• RSS, mediaRSS, RSS for comments
• Technical image info like shutter speed, aperture, ISO, camera model
• Anonymous user registration
• Improved Homepage with recent media and comments
• New database schema with splitted media and files (see merged-branch-phtagr-media-schema)
• Quick Search (thanks to martin)
• Authenticated links for users and guests
• Improved file browser
• Tabbed input
• New FilterManager to handle different media like images, videos and GPS logs
• New Pagination component with exclusions
• Static Logger
• Updated Flowplayer to 3.1.4
• Media view count
• Much much more and of course lots of bug fixes

Also:

• First Plugin DupFinder is available to find and merge duplicate media
• Since version 2.0 we have also a documentation and ticket system at http://trac.phtagr.org

It is recommended to upgrade to version 2.1 since you don’t want to miss the new features! Please upgrade your database schema with the provided shell script upgradeMediaSchema.

phTagr supports now (simple) geo tagging of the media. Input fields where added to the meta data form and the latitude and longitude values could be entered directly. Additional, the google map shows the current location of the center which could be used through copy’n'paste for the geo input.

So select an image with geo location, open the map and center the map to the location for the new media. Copy the location below the map and insert it into the geo input form.

Happy Geo Tagging!

Update 2009-11-03: A context menu was added to help to navigate through the map, which is opened by the right mouse click. It adds following actions: Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in here, and Center here. Especially the last action is helpful to find the correct position!

Recently I looked for a nice and easy photo resize tool to downsize a heap of photos under Windows and found the coolest tool ever: Picture Resizer.

It is only 300k small and has an indirect parameterisation for the resize command. All parameters are given in the filename of the tool itself. You download the tool and rename according to the documentation.

E.g. Rename it to PhotoResize1280MSQ85O.exe and move the desired JPEGs per drag’n'drop over the exe file – done. The commands in the name say: resize the photos to maximum of 1280 pixels, copy the Meta data, with the Quality of 85% and doesn’t wait for the enter (O).

Than zip all resized pictures and upload the zip archive to the phtagr gallery. (And later I will merge the previews to the original photos with the DupFinder plugin.)

Awesome.

Recently the welcome page of phtagr was redesigned and is now more responsive.

The tag and category clouds are moved down whereas a random picture and a couple new media are shown on the top.  These changes are more informative for new and old visitors who want to know whats going on.

Go have a look!

As by today the first phTagr plugin is released: The DupFinder plugin finds media duplicates and merges the copies to one master media.

This plugin is very helpful if first lower quality media are uploaded to phTagr and the original data are uploaded on a later stage.

Example Scenario: Bob is traveling and want to upload his new vacation images as quick as possible. However, the Internet connection at the NetCafe is slow and upload of all original media is time consuming. Bob selects the best images and creates preview of it, which he uploads to phTagr. While Bob continue to travel his friends can tag the image and write comments.

When Bob arrives at home he uploads the original media and merges the tags and comments of the previews to the original.

See the wiki page of DupFinder for more details.

A new awesome option was finally added to phTagr: the anonymous user registration. With this option enabled users can register by themselves and get a initial upload quota. The initial upload quota is set by the site admin in the registration settings.

After the user submits initial data like username, password and email the user must confirm the account creation by a key which is sent to his email address.

This new feature will now gain thousands and thousands of new user *harhar*.

See all the screenshots of the user registration.

The branch phtagr-media-schema was merged to the trunk successfully. The new database schema fits more the database relation between files and media and changes the model Image to the model Media.

Upgrade your phTagr instance

The database must be upgraded to the new schema. However, the new merged trunk comes with a handy shell script upgradeMediaSchema which handles the database upgrade and data migration. Update your phtagr code of trunk via svn and change to your phtagr directory and execute the shell script by ‘../cake/console/cake -app phtagr upgradeMediaSchema upgrade‘

phtagr$ svn up
phtagr$ ../cake/console/cake -app phtagr upgradeMediaSchema
Schema Upgrade Shell Script for Media Schema
---------------------------------------------------------------
Help screen
---------------------------------------------------------------
upgrade
    Upgrade schema to media schema
---------------------------------------------------------------
phtagr$ ../cake/console/cake -app phtagr upgradeMediaSchema upgrade
Schema Upgrade Shell Script for Media Schema
---------------------------------------------------------------
Prepare upgrade...
Upgrade schema...
Migrate 132 media...
Finalizing upgrade...
All done. Enjoy!
phtagr$

Reasons for a new Schema

The old schema uses only one table for a image/media which includes also the file information. Since a media is not only restricted to one file, this schema does not model the reality well. E.g. a media could be a video and the video thumb file or an image with a sound memo attached to it. Since now, phTagr uses also the term media instead of image.

The new schema splits the old table images to the table media and table files while the model Media gets a HasMany relation to the model File.

Other changes

The merge comes also with an improved import functionality. phTagr has now a Filter Manger which handles the import and export of a media and/or metadata. Currently there are three different filters:

• Image Filter (JPEG)
• Video Filter (AVI, MOV, MPEG, THM)
• GPS Filter (LOG)

New filters could be implemented more convenient (e.g. a Sound Filter which attaches a sound memo to a media). The Filter Manager supports a priority based import that a video thumbnail is read after the video file.