Posts Tagged ‘piwigo’
Piwigo App for Android
If you happen to use Piwigo to publish and share your photos on the web, you’ll appreciate the brand new Piwigo app for the Android platform.
This app is designed to help you manage your Piwigo gallery from the convenience of your Android device. As such it doesn’t allow you to browse albums and view photos (to do that you might want to give the ReGalAndroid app a try). The app itself is pretty straightforward in use. First off, you have to connect the app to your Piwigo instance, which is done in the Settings section. The Album view lets you select an existing album and change its permissions, create new albums, and upload photos.
Before you can upload photos, you have to select them in the Photos view. Here, you can also edit the title, author, and description for each selected photo. Once you are done, press the Upload button and the app will do the rest. That’s all there is to it. The Piwigo app is not exactly overloaded with features, but it gets the job done with a minimum of fuss.
digiKam Tricks 3.7 Released
This release includes the following new material:
- Assign Keyboard Shortcuts to Tags
- Configure the Main Toolbar in digiKam
- Host Your Own Photo Gallery with Piwigo
Readers who already purchased the book will receive the new version free of charge. If you haven’t received your copy, please send your order confirmation as proof of purchase to dmpop@linux.com, and I’ll email you the latest version of the book.
Happy reading!
Install the Latest Version of pLoader for Piwigo
The pLoader utility offers the most convenient and efficient way of adding photos to your Piwigo-based gallery directly from your desktop. While the official Piwigo extension repository provides a compiled version of pLoader, if you prefer to use the very latest release of the utility, you should download and run the most recent version available in the SVN repository.
The first order of business is to install all the required packages. On Ubuntu and its derivatives, this can be done using the following command:
sudo apt-get install subversion perl libwx-perl-processstream-perl libfile-slurp-perl libfile-homedir-perl libjson-perl libdigest-md5-file-perl libimage-exiftool-perl perlmagick libcrypt-cbc-perl libcrypt-des-perl libclass-accessor-perl
Next, point your browser to http://piwigo.org/svn/extensions/pLoader/tags/ and note the most recent version of pLoader (e.g., 1.6). Open the Terminal and run the command below:
svn export http://piwigo.org/svn/extensions/pLoader/tags/1.6 pLoader
This will download the latest release of pLoader in the pLoader folder in your home directory. That’s all there is to it.
To launch pLoader, open the Terminal switch to the bin directory and execute the pLoader.pl:
cd /pLoader/bin/
pl pLoader.pl
To avoid opening the Terminal and typing the commands every time you want to launch pLoader, you can create a simple Bash script. Create a new text file containing the following commands:
#!/bin/bash
cd /pLoader/src/
perl pLoader.pl
Save the file as the pLoader.sh script, and make it executable using the chmod a+x pLoader.sh command. You can then launch pLoader by double-clicking on the script.
Leaving Flickr Behind: Why You Should Host Your Own Photos and Why Linux Makes It so Damn Easy
I’ve left Flickr. After many years as a loyal Flickr user, I decided not to extend my pro account and leave the popular photo sharing service altogether. Why? For starters, I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to a rather simple question: What would happen if Flickr fails? It may be difficult to imagine that Flickr would disappear, but remember that Flickr is just a business — and not a profitable one at that. And even if Yahoo! will continue supporting Flickr, what will happen if I wake up one morning and discover that my account has been deleted without any prior warning? Not that it has never happened to anyone before.
These questions were only one reason why I started thinking about leaving Flickr. Another important reason has a lot to do with my work as an evangelist for Excito, a Swedish company that develops the B3 Linux-based personal server. This tiny yet powerful device can handle pretty much every task you throw at it, and I’ve been using it as my file server and backup solution for quite a while. And since it comes with the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack, the decision to use B3 for hosting my photos was a no-brainer.
The server sports its own easy-to-use photo album application which makes it supremely easy to create slick albums from directories containing photos and share them with others. Although it’s a decent solution for quick and easy photo sharing, it’s a bit limited for my needs. Fortunately, there is no lack of good LAMP-based open source photo sharing applications, and after doing some research, I decided to go with the Piwigo solution. Since B3 has all the required components installed and configured, deploying Piwigo was a pretty straightforward thing to do. So I had my photo sharing solution up and running in almost no time.
Of course, the fact that B3 is capable of running LAMP-based applications right out of the box saved me a lot of time and effort. But with a little more work, you can deploy a photo sharing application on any Linux-based machine. On Debian or Ubuntu, installing the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack is a matter of executing a few simple commands (for example see: Installing Apache2 With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 10.10). The XAMPP package provides an even more straightforward solution.
Sure, Piwigo is no Flickr killer, but it has all the features I need. You can organize photos into categories, specify access privileges for each photo, let visitors comment and rate your photos, and much more. Better yet, you can extend the application’s default functionality with plugins. For example, I installed plugins that collect visitor stats, enable Facebook sharing, and map geotagged photos using Google Maps.
Leaving Flickr and hosting photos on my own server meant losing the social features that are an integral part of the popular photo sharing service. But was that such a big loss? Not for me. I do have a few Flickr contacts whose photos I enjoy, but that’s about it. I used to post my photos in different groups, but comments like “Awesome shot,” “Love it!” “Great DOF” didn’t really help me to take better photos.
Hosting photos on your own server is not for everyone, though. In addition to a dedicated server, you need a decent Internet connection, and you have to take care of backup and other practicalities. But if you want complete control over your photos and the way you share them, or you are not happy with Flickr for other reasons, then going the self-hosting route makes a lot of sense. Besides, it doesn’t have to be an either-or decision: you can still use Flickr and use your own server as Plan B.
Want to see the B3/Piwigo combo in action? Visit my photo gallery and read more about the B3 server at excito.com.
