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› May 1, 2003

PhotoPal

  • Reported by Nate

Noel Jackson has put together one great php based web photo album generator. PhotoPal according to his site:

What is PhotoPal in one sentence? PhotoPal is an image organization system featuring Textism-style picture layout, automatic thumbnail creation, RSS feeds, picture level EXIF date extraction, and picture level descriptions, all without the need for an SQL like database.

The key to PhotoPal's success in my opinion is the ease of setup and use. No database saves a step, no need to make thumbnails (they are created on first load automatically) saves a lot of steps. I can't imagine a faster or easier way to grab your favorite photos off a digital camera and have them on a website as well considered as Dean's gallery design. Additionally, tweaking of the design looks to be quite feasible if you don't mind sorting through a bit of fancy php scripting for whatever HTML tags or CSS you seek.

I decided to try it out here, using photos from a year ago when I went to NYC. In doing so I did discover one tiny drawback to all the automation - the gallery is dated for today, when I posted them, rather than an easily customizable date. Don't get me wrong, this was remarkably easy and fool proof for a Beta (0.9.6 at time of writing this). I'll be going back to NYC later this month, so more photos will be posted soon.

Comments

1. May 2, 2003 12:19 AM

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Noel D. Jackson Posted…

Hey Nate, I've been working on PhotoPal *quite*a*bit* lately. It is a helluva lot faster and sports a few extra features. Included in 0.9.6 is one thing you *possibly* forgot about when you stated the one drawback you had: EXIF date extraction. This means that if EXIF data is present in a photo it will be dated as such, otherwise it will show the file modified time. The bad thing is that PhotoShop seems to strip the EXIF data sometimes (I think when you export to 'web safe'). Your graphic editor is probably to blame. I'm using Graphic Converter after exporting full size images from iPhoto and making sure it saves the EXIF data. I'm thinking of writing an iPhoto plugin and web-based FTP interface to go along with PhotoPal to provide a round-trip photo organization system. Cheers.

2. May 2, 2003 01:09 AM

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Noel D. Jackson Posted…

You said: Additionally, tweaking of the design looks to be quite feasible if you don?t mind sorting through a bit of fancy php scripting for whatever HTML tags or CSS you seek. Well, you can be rest assured that templating will be incorporated into the next releases. That will make it even easier to 'tweak the design'. :-)

3. May 2, 2003 01:30 AM

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Nate Posted…

Noel.. I did some followup investigation into the file dating. The images used were originally exported from Photoshop on October 24 of 2002. When I opened the file and checked the EXIF info in photoshop, the data seemed to be retained as seen here. Then I checked the file using the "Get Info" function that is part of OS X, it also reported that date. So then I went onto the server where I uploaded the files, and checked the info there using my FTP client's (Transmit) "Get Info" feature, and that is the first instance where I saw the current date listed. I re-downloaded the file and checked to see if the EXIF info had somehow been stripped out, but it was still there, and still reported the original October date. So, it would seem that somehow my file modified time (added when the file was uploaded to the server today) somehow superseded the EXIF info? I only report this hoping that will be of help, or use, or at least some interest to other readers. Please know that my report about PhotoPal is mostly to let folks know just how cool it is. If there is some sort of weirdness with EXIF or file modification dates that ends up being very difficult, one workaround would be to simply have an optional 3rd variable that could be added to the description files when needed. For instance, I probably wouldn't worry too much about the individual files, but would use it to override the date set in the index of galleries page.

4. May 2, 2003 09:13 AM

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Noel D. Jackson Posted…

I thank you VERY MUCH for your input. It is the case that EXIF data is being a pain for me. I will take your suggestions to heart. The next release should definitely fix your problems. :-) I'm hoping to have it done by Monday or thereabouts. Thanks for helping me get the word out about it. Cheers.

5. May 5, 2003 08:55 AM

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Noel D. Jackson Posted…

PhotoPal 0.9.8b is out. Let me know if it fixes your EXIF date problems. http://noeljackson.com/code/photopal/ Cheers.