COLUMNS
COOKING WITH LINUX
Figure 4. Installation is guided with pointers to help you set up your database.
Figure 3. Quick, easy and stylish—Shalbum uses bash to generate a Web album.
The result of this command is shown in Figure 3. What I’ve done with the above command is pass a title for the album (the -t option), selected a 200-pixel thumbnail (the -T option) and specified that the main page should display four columns of thumbnails. The resulting album is generated in a subfolder called—wait for it— album. You can transfer that entire folder to your Web site, and you are good to go. The presentation for Shalbum is nice. Each photo displays not only forward and back links to navigate through the gallery, but also shows the previous and next thumbnail at the bottom of
Perl is cool, of course. But a good old-fashioned bash script is equally cool, and that’s the heart of Eduardo Sztokbant’s Shalbum. each page. At the top of the gallery, you’ll see a link labeled Play. That starts the slideshow. You can specify the number of seconds between each photo by using the -S option. The final item on tonight’s menu is far more complex and does require server-side access, as well as an Apache server with PHP and MySQL. The result is fantastic and yet amazingly easy to work with. It’s called ZenPhoto, and it is probably the nicest and easiest Web photo gallery program I’ve seen so far. Despite its ease of use, the feature list is nothing short of impressive. EXIF 26 | july 2008 w w w. l i n u x j o u r n a l . c o m
Figure 5. Two steps later, you are ready to log in and start uploading photos.
and IPTC support is built in, as is support for video (Flash, QuickTime and 3GP). Images are uploaded via the Web interface, but you also can use FTP or SCP if you prefer. The interface makes it easy to edit as you go, make comments, tag photos, rate individual albums or photos, and generate albums from searches. You can watermark images, password-protect the gallery or individual albums, set up RSS feeds, allow users to comment and more. There can be multiple galleries and even sub-galleries. Have I mentioned that ZenPhoto is also themeable? To get started, visit the ZenPhoto Web site at www.zenphoto.org, and download the latest source. Extract the bundle into your Web server’s hierarchy. Of course, only you will know where exactly, but you pretty much can put it anywhere you like under those constraints. ZenPhoto does not need to be at Web root. That said, you do need to have administrative access to the system, or at least MySQL. Extract the package into your chosen location with this command: tar -xzvf zenphoto-1.1.5.tar.gz