Create Web-based Photo Galleries

If you've been to Flickr and envy the kinds of things you can do there, don't despair, Coppermine lets you do the same in about 15 minutes

Monday, January 01, 2007

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Coppermine is a powerful image gallery application from Sourceforge. It comes with a wide array of features like multiple albums and assigning ratings to uploaded pictures using star ratings.

Step 1: Installation
Set up a system to run Apache, PHP and MySQL. We used Win XP with the EasyPHP package to do this quickly. You should already have GD Library installed if you used EasyPHP. Else, download it from www.boutell.com/gd. Download Coppermine Photo Gallery from www.coppermine-gallery.net  and upload all the files from the ZIP to your local Web server into a folder named 'Coppermine' and start setting it up by navigating to: http://127.0.0.1/Coppermine/install.php  from the same machine. Follow the onscreen instructions and fill out the details as required. Choose an administrator username and password for Coppermine, and credentials for your MySQL database (as provided during the EasyPHP setup). Keep the defaults suggested for the other values. Click on 'lets go' to finish.

Step 2: Customization
Login to your admin panel and customize your gallery according to your preferences. Next you would upload the pictures into these albums using HTTP or FTP.

While you can customize the height and width of the thumbnails, you can even set how many thumbnails you want to display on a particular page. There are a few built-in Coppermine templates available. You can choose one of them or download others that are available over the Internet for free.

Users can upload pictures via HTTP using an upload form. Administrators can batch add files via FTP to the albums folder and put them up for viewing.

Coppermine's powerful scripts allow image browsing, thumbnail views, keyword search and more with minor configuration

Step 3: Search for images
You search in two ways, either a text box search which has added features to search by filename or search using keywords. Keywords can be added or changed by the administrators at any point of time. Keyword search feature is quite helpful for those who are new to your website and don't know how to search on it.

We recommend you take a backup of your pictures, because you cannot recover pictures and albums once deleted. Coppermine gallery is also fully upgradeable. If there is a new version out, you can simply upload its files via FTP and upgrade to the newer version.

Sulabh Puri

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