phTagr

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.

phTagr supports the WebDAV network storage protocol to upload and manage your media files. While WebDAV is supported by all common OSs it is tricky within Windows (especially without encryption and the advanced Digest Authentication Schema). Free and simple alternatives for Windows are rare. On the other hand cadaver is a simple command line WebDAV client for Unix/Linux. There is also a cadaver package for cygwin to run it in Windows – but cygwin is bloody huge.

Therefore, I created a minimalistic version of cadaver for Windows from the cygwin packages and pack them to a useful zip archive. The minimalistic version comes with the required DLLs only. You can unzip the archive and use it (of cause the origin licenses of cadaver and its dependencies applies).

[Update] The command ‘ls.exe’ is now included to inspect the local directory. Call ‘lls’ within cadaver to see current directory content. Furthe the script ‘cadaver.bat’ sets the path of cadaver to the PATH environment variable to find ‘ls.exe’. So call ‘cadaver.bat’ instead ‘cadaver.exe’!

Download cadaver with required DLLs: cadaver-0.23.3-1 (updated version from 2011-04-29)
Download cadaver with required DLLs: cadaver-0.23.2-minimalistic-2.zip
Download all cygwin packages: cadaver-0.23.2-minimalistic.pkgs-2.zip

Enjoy.