How to make a personal photo-sharing site

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Discussion Overview

The discussion revolves around creating a personal photo-sharing site for family use, focusing on user-friendly options that allow for easy uploads and viewing of images. Participants explore various software solutions and platforms that could facilitate this goal, comparing them to existing services like Shutterfly.

Discussion Character

  • Exploratory
  • Technical explanation
  • Debate/contested

Main Points Raised

  • One participant expresses a desire to transform a personal website into a family photo-sharing site, seeking options that allow for direct uploads and a user-friendly interface similar to Shutterfly.
  • Another participant suggests using Filezilla for FTP transfers, noting that it requires users to learn a new interface and lacks image previews.
  • Some participants argue that FTP does not meet the needs of a photo-sharing site, as it does not provide context or previews for images.
  • There is a mention of the potential for a client/server application that combines photo sharing, viewing, and file transfer, although no specific recommendations are provided.
  • One participant points to open source photo gallery projects as possible solutions, suggesting a Google search for options.
  • A participant shares experiences with various image hosting services like Flickr and Picasa, while cautioning about past issues with PHP Album and the importance of security vigilance.
  • Another participant indicates they are trying out Coppermine gallery, noting its appealing themes and ease of configuration.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express a range of opinions on the best approach to creating a photo-sharing site, with no consensus on a single solution. Various software options are discussed, but uncertainty remains regarding the best fit for the original poster's needs.

Contextual Notes

Some participants reference past experiences with software that had security vulnerabilities, indicating that users should be cautious and vigilant regardless of the solution chosen. There are also mentions of the limitations of FTP in the context of photo sharing.

Who May Find This Useful

This discussion may be useful for individuals looking to create a personal photo-sharing site, especially those interested in user-friendly interfaces and open-source solutions.

Mech_Engineer
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Hi all, this seems like the best area for this question.

I have a personal website for my wife and I that we don't do much with these days, I'd kind of like to turn it into a family photo-sharing site that my wife and I can use to upload pictures for our extended family to look at and download if desired. Ideally, I would like to make it so uploads can be done on the site directly with an admin login, my wife uses Shutterfly right now so the closer to Shutterfly's interface the better...

What are the relatively painless options out there? I'd probably be willing to pay under $100 for a pre-packaged interface (Flash, HTML5, whatever) if it was really slick. I have experience installing/running my own phpBB forums and some basic Java and HTML programming, but I can't build this kind of thing from scratch if you know what I mean. I have Dreamweaver if that helps/hurts.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.
 
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Filezilla is a free FTP transfer program, but the users would have to learn how to use it, since it's not a browser. It's similar to having two windows explorer windows open at ths same time, and you just use drag and drop to upload or download files.
 
Sure FTP is ok for moving bulk files, but it doen't show previews of pictures, and doesn't allow you to give context to a group of pictures like a photo-sharing site might.

What we want is basically Shutterfly or Facebook photo sharing, on our website (with full-res downloads available when logged-in). I'm sure there's got to be some kind of interface you can buy that provides this functionality.
 
Mech_Engineer said:
Sure FTP is ok for moving bulk files, but it doen't show previews of pictures, and doesn't allow you to give context to a group of pictures like a photo-sharing site might.
You could just have the users switch between two applications, one for viewing, one for transferring files. The free photosharing sites are OK, but they generally pester you with ads and want email addresses to send spam to all the viewers.

You're probably correct in there's probably some client / server app that combines photo sharing, viewing, grouping, and transfer feature that will work with a cheap web hosting service, but I"m not aware of any.
 
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A few of my semi-pro photographer friends use Flickr / MobileMe / Picasa for their image hosting / sharing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photo_sharing_websites

We used to use PHP Album, but the first version contained a bug that, partnered with the older version of PHP the server used, allowed a Russian "pharmacy" to operate on our server for a while (then IT noticed quite a bit of odd behaviour and pulled the plug). That's been patched, but the lesson here is that, no matter what you use, you have to stay vigilant.
 
Thanks guys, those two projects look like a good start for what I'm after!

Feel free to chime in if you find anything else :biggrin:
 
I'm trying out Coppermine gallery for a start, we'll see how it goes. Coppermine has a nice set of pre-made themes that look pretty slick and seem easy to configure...

http://coppermine-gallery.net/
 

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