Folks,

I just finished developing a tool that allows UBB users to upload photos to a public gallery.

You can download it here:

http://perl.bobbitt.ca/album

If you want to see it in action here it is:

Upload photo page:
http://perl.bobbitt.ca/cgi-bin/album.pl?function=upload

View photo gallery:
http://perl.bobbitt.ca/cgi-bin/album.pl

Looking for feedback...

WOW! I have been searching a long time for such a hack, I really would like to use it but the only thing i'm missing is the ability for users to create their own sections/directories/categories and the possibility to list all categories
a) alphabetically
b) by date (chronologically)
c) by user who uploaded the pictures
It would be also a great thing to resize all thumbnails to the same size, so the overview would look more 'clean' -
GREAT! please drop me an email concerning this hack 2
chris@technoforum.de
thanks a lot and i'm wondering why noone else seems to be intersted in this hack
chris
http://technoforum.de

I've put the scripts online at http://perl.cdnarmy.ca/. They still need some work, but it's coming along.

I like your ideas, I'll throw them on to the "to do" list. They're certainly all possible. The thumbnails are actually built as files (using Thotor, a thumbnail generator), so they can be built according to personal taste. I'd love to have an "on the fly" thumbnail generator, but I haven't been able to find one...

Thanks, and keep the comments coming!

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 14, 2001 02:05 PM: Message edited by: bobbitt ]</font>

I really like this and have downloaded the .zip file. I would be all for having you clean it up and make installing it easier. Looking at the files, I see you have a large range of directories that the script uses. (/data/photos) or (d:/profiles/bobbitt/Inetpub/wwwroot/cgi-bin/photo.gif") and (../img/photo.gif).

I'd love to test this out for myself but knowing what to change and not to change seems to be the headache here.

Great idea though, congrats on pushing it out to all of us. Hope to see some instructions with this.

*edit* It's going slowly but I'm putting it together step by step.

Perhaps the "Error - Error opening file for writing" comment when trying to write to the gallery directory could be clearer. I didn't know if it was the log file or the image that it couldn't open. (Had to set my permissions to my gallery directory to chmod 666).

Also, one has to create a 0 byted log file (gallery.log) before the log file will start working. Perhaps include this in your zip file. At least, that's what I had to do before I could get past the log error messages

Another idea (sorry, just brain storming) is a file size limit. Someone could rename a 500meg bin file to image01.jpg and submit it, crashing the server.

Question: If a user is banned from the message board, will the gallery script detect this and disallow photo submissions? Can a user who's IP is banned from posting on UBB still submit as well?

Ever thought of a rating system? Users could vote for their favorite image. Then you could have a "Top 10 Images" within the photo gallery.

This has great potential and I hope you continue to work on it in your spare time as it will get a lot of use and support!

Last note: Just got it working. For anyone wanting to install this, throw it into your cgi-bin directory and run the gallery.pl or album.pl from your browser. Any errors will happen on screen and you can fix them in the associated .pl file.

p2kay

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 12, 2001 07:55 AM: Message edited by: p2k ]</font>

Ok, the 2 major things I'm working on first are:

<OL TYPE=1>

[*] Merging gallery.pl and album.pl into one program, so they can share settings.

[*] Moving all the settings out to a config file, and cleaning up the installation instruvtions.
</OL>

Once that's done, I think I'll be in a better position to address the other requests. Keep nagging me if you don't hear from me in a few days...

Cheers

Edit: Wow, P2K your post changed on me! I'll have to go back and read it again, looks like you've added some great feedback. Thanks! (Just wanted to say that I wasn't ignoring your message with this post...)

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 12, 2001 11:00 AM: Message edited by: bobbitt ]</font>

Thanks Mike for adding your work here, I am gonna move this thread to our "beta" forum, you should see a good bit more response there...:D

Thanks. It looks like my request for feedback has turned into more of a beta trial...

Cheers

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 12, 2001 11:31 AM: Message edited by: bobbitt ]</font>

im thinking of making this replace my page:
http://www.411hype.com/html/memberphotos.shtml

but id hafta do alot of mods hm......i think ill watch this hakc progress into a UBB hack not a stand alone as it is right now

Gallery Update.

This update is without any changes (visual appeal, added tables, layout etc).

Perhaps Bobbitt can help me on this as I've run into a little problem.

In the demo you provided in the original thread, you posted a link and in this link it had categories.

This I figured out by creating sub-directories within the Photo_Album directory. All is fine when you upload an image and select the category. I check the server and the image is placed in the proper directory.

My question is, how do I go about showing these directories/categories in the album.pl file as shown in the working demo you created? Is there a line I've forgotten to edit manually?

Once I get this working I want to see how well I'll be able to mold it into a sites looks with tables and what not.

Thanks!

A fellow Canadian (Toronto),

pTWOk

Both files should automatically sense all the directories created under your $rootdir.

For gallery.pl, that means that they will automatically show up as categories to upload photos under, and for album.pl, they appear as "albums" with the appropriate photos inside.

I'm not sure if that answered your question or not...

If you give me the URL you're working with (PM if you don't want to make it public) I'll see if I can figure out what's going on...

Cheers

I like this - looks like a great idea.

A few ideas would be to limit the file size of uploads, make it so that members could see from thier profile which images they have uploaded and are given the ability to delete ones that they no longer want there.

This would be usefull as many of my UBB members do not have webspace and hense can not add images to posts. With this feature, members could upload images and add them into post much more easily.

Keep up the good work.

I, for one, hope it remains a standalone... ubb integration is cool, but it always means editing of files for every ubb upgrade... plus, those of us on the beta team can't edit any ubb files...

That doesn't mean, however, that the code can't be cleaned up, optimized, with tighter variable integration... wouldn't it be nice to just upload scripts without having to edit them first?

We already have at least one general purpose file upload script integrated into the ubb...:)

I tend to agree with Allen. I've moved all the config info out to a separate file now, so upgrading the album software will just mean dropping the new script in place and making sure it can find the config file. Still working on getting the upload functionality merged, but I expect I'll have a new version ready to go later on tonight...

Ok, 3.0 is ready. This essentially has the 2 changes above put in. The config info is in album.cfg, and the old gallery.pl is now merged into the script. (So you only have to set config info once!)

This should make the install/config process much easier to deal with. I haven't had a chance to look at most of the other requests yet, but hopefully I've managed to capture them in the "To Do" section of album.html.

Cheers

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ June 14, 2001 02:06 PM: Message edited by: bobbitt ]</font>

GREAT I have been looking for a hack like this for a long time!

The config portion still needs some work, but it's passable now. If anyone gets stuck, just post here, PM or e-mail me and I'll do my best to help out.

Cheers

Ok, 3.1 is out:

http://perl.cdnarmy.ca/album31.zip

Updates:

• Can use UBB authentication or flatfile DB authentication.
• For UBB authentication, can have users automatically upload photos into their own directories. Users can only upload into their "personal" directory.
• Several bug fixes.

Cheers

Sounds good Mike

Hi! Whe are probably stupid but we try to install your album for 2 hours(and we are not newbies) now and we just do not understand your installation. Can you please tell us what directory and files we have to create and where they go with the appropriate chmod. For sure you are not the king for editing a mods.

The album.pl file has to be in your cgi-bin directory. From there, edit the $configfile line in it to set the location of album.cfg (can be in the cgi-bin directory as well). Then edit album.cfg to set all your paths and preferences. You'll need to create a directory to hold all your photos, and make it world writable if you want to be able to upload or add descriptions through the web.

Now run album.pl from the web. If there are any problems, you'll get an error message. If not, any photos in your new directory will be displayed.

An overview of the installation process is in the album.html file. It needs work, but it's a start.

If you can give me the error message your getting, and what you've done to this point, I'm sure we can figure it out.

Cheers

<FONT COLOR="#000000" SIZE="1">[ July 09, 2001 11:54 AM: Message edited by: Mike Bobbitt ]</font>