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.

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!

A screenshot might help to describe the feature or visit the demo page for a live example.

The GPS coordinates are exported to the EXIF header as GPSLatitude, GPSLatitudeRef, GPSLongitude, GPSLongitudeRef values on the next meta data sync.

While the GPS data are saved in UCT, your timezone of your image might be a different one. The current implementation has a static time offset of two hours (UCT+2), but a special option should be implemented soon. Also an import filter for KML files would be a nice option.