ArticlesWhich requirements does Coppermine Photo Gallery meet?
| Id | Pri | Requirement | Pass? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GEN1 | C | Accessible by a typical web-browser | Y | |
| GEN2 | I | Active development of new features | Y | |
| OWN1 | C | Ownership of photos is retained by me. | Y | |
| OWN2 | C | Future-proofed against money running out: mine or yours | Y | |
| OWN3 | I | Ownership of meta-data is retained by me. | Y | |
| CAT1 | C | Photographs grouped into albums by event | Y | |
| CAT2 | C | Photographs tagged with people | Y | By keywords; no spaces allowed. |
| CAT3 | I | Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities | Y | By keywords; no spaces allowed. |
| CAT4 | I | Performers tagged with real and stage names. | Y | |
| CAT5 | I | Attribution of photographer details | N | |
| CAT6 | I | Attribution of copyright owner’s details | N | |
| CAT7 | I | Rating of photographs | Y | |
| CAT8 | I | Sorting/Filtering by rating | Y | |
| CAT9 | D | Albums grouped by type | Y | |
| CAT10 | D | Albums grouped by date | N | |
| CAT11 | D | Areas or points of photograph tagged | N | |
| CAT12 | D | Simple contact management of subjects | N | |
| CAT13 | D | Hidden fields on contacts to distinguish like-named people | N | |
| CAT14 | D | Tagging of anonymous people to enable searching | N | |
| CAT15 | D | Corrections to names update everywhere | N | |
| CAT16 | D | Attribution of copyright details | N | |
| CAT17 | D | Control over (default) ordering | Y | |
| S+L1 | C | Link to other photos with same tag within an album | Y | By keywords |
| S+L2 | I | Associate URLs with subjects, that are displayed. | N | |
| S+L3 | I | Link to other photos with same tag across my albums | Y | |
| S+L4 | I | Search of tags by keyword | Y | |
| S+L5 | I | Cross-promotion of other albums and sites. | N | Can’t include HTML |
| S+L6 | D | Link to other photos with same tag across other photo sites | N | |
| S+L7 | D | Search of album names by keyword | N | |
| S+L8 | D | User-generatable URLs to search tags by keyword | N | Borderline. Could be faked with .htaccess |
| COMM1 | D | Multi-user Tagging | N | |
| COMM2 | D | Notifications of appearance in photos | N | |
| COMM3 | D | Comments permitted | Y | |
| COMM4 | D | Notification of comments | ? | |
| COMM5 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for comments | N | Might be through plug-in |
| COMM6 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects | N | |
| COMM7 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos | N | |
| PQ1 | C | Web-quality images shall be displayed by default. | Y | |
| PQ2 | I | Print-quality images shall be available. | Y | |
| PQ3 | I | Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions. | Y | |
| PQ4 | D | Archive-quality images shall be stored. | ? | |
| PQ5 | D | Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.) | N | |
| PQ6 | D | Support for short video | Y | Just a file, not a modern player. |
| PQ7 | D | Support for long video | Y | |
| PERF1 | I | Quota > 0.5 TB, if any | Y | |
| PERF2 | I | Low-cost | Y | |
| PERF3 | I | Fast response time | Y | |
| PERF4 | I | Scale to thousands of tags | Y | |
| PERF5 | I | < 1 minute face-time per photograph | N | Interface is a bit clumsy |
| PERF6 | D | Free | Y | |
| UI1 | C | Forward/Backward navigation between photos in album. | Y | |
| UI2 | D | Slideshows | Y | |
| UI3 | D | Display of many thumbnails at once | ? | |
| PRIV1 | C | Their email address should never be published on the web. | Y | |
| PRIV2 | I | Registration and logging in not required for general use. | Y | |
| PRIV3 | I | Robust privacy features for photographs | Y | |
| WF1 | I | Hint to original location on my harddrive | Y | |
| WF2 | I | Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input | N | |
| WF3 | D | Read EXIF data from image | N | |
| WF4 | D | Support unpublished draft state | N | |
| MIGR1 | C | API to add photos | Y | I can read schema. |
| MIGR2 | C | API to add tags | Y | I can read schema. |
| MIGR3 | I | Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo | Y | |
| METR1 | D | “How many visitors?” metric | N | |
| METR2 | D | “How long does a visitor stay?†metric | N |
Summary
About 12 months ago, I looked seriously into migrating across to Coppermine. It meets all of the critical requirements, and it appeared to be the most robust of the open-source, self-hosted photo gallery solutions. While I looked at the effort to migrate the photo data across, I slowly became less enchanted with it; especially by the clunkiness of the keywords, and the clutter of the album pages.
The tricky part about evaluating it is that, with plug-ins and themes, some of the clunkiness about it may turn out to be simple to disable or fix up, once you know how. Alternatively, two weeks’ effort would probably allow me to make my own theme if none of them meet my needs.
This software looks like it would form a good adjunct to your community forum web-site, but the default look-and-feel doesn’t seem to suit the personal photo site.
It is potentially a solution – I highly rate the free as in beer and free as in freedom nature of it – but I am hoping I could do better?
Comment by Richard Atkins on June 23, 2008
Shouldn’t this be 4c?
Comment by Julian on June 23, 2008
Ooops, fixed. Thanks.
Comment by Alastair on June 24, 2008
Link to coppermine website is broken.
Comment by Julian on June 24, 2008
Ooops, fixed. Thanks. Again.