OddThinking

These notes on Coppermine are based on a deeper evaluation I just performed. They should be read in conjunction with my previous notes on Coppermine.

My opinion of Coppermine seems to vary. As you may recall, it was the winner of the initial informal competition. Then I evaluated it formally and said “Okay, but I can do better”. Now, I have taken another look and I am thinking “Yeah, I can live with this.”

Clarifications/Corrections of Previous Claim

I had another look at its capabilities. I do not know why I said it was unable to read EXIF data (requirement WD2), as that is definitely an option, with control over which fields it displays. It also displays IPTC data.

I did not test its display of Photographer and Copyright information from the EXIF/IPTC fields; I am confident that even if it doesn’t by default, I can make it do so easily. If I can’t read it from the image, I can use a couple of the five available custom fields to store the data (which would mean writing a tool to automatically fill the data in when it is left blank.)

In order to meet the requirement to store archive-quality images (PQ4), I pushed the maximum size of the uploaded photos up from the restrictive 1 MB default limit. I found that it needed to be configured to use the ImageMagick library rather than GD2 to handle the large files without running out of memory; fortunately this was trivial on my server through the Coppermine config pages.

Space-separated tags (or keywords) continue to annoy me. I either need to CamelCase or Underscore_Separate people’s names. (The manual also suggests using non-ASCII space characters from supported charset.) Oddly, you can’t even insert spaces by escaping with double-quotes – the double-quotes are treated like just another character, except that they can’t be easily deleted once created! Oops.

It isn’t possible to allow non-admins to tag images. That was a desirable requirement, but I would like to push it up to Important, having just finished taking many thousands of photos of people I can’t name. However, there is a comment form which allows users to quickly feedback identity information, which can then be manually transcribed by me. A drag, but a vast improvement on my current situation, where users offer to make corrections, but then don’t bother to tell me when they learn it requires an email; it’s too hard.

I previously claimed that there might be plugins to support feeds. Searching for a few minutes found several possible contenders. I didn’t check that any of them did what I needed though.

I wasn’t sure whether it was possible to display many thumbnails at once. The answer is that you can. The theme has a certain amount of clutter preventing you from going overboard, but I could comfortably fit 6 generously-sized thumbnails per line, with a customisably large number of lines per page.

Subject Descriptions

A couple of the requirements (viz S+L2 and S+L6) are, at heart, about associating some extra HTML text with a tag. (CAT13 is as well, but the extra text is hiddent from public view.) At first blush, this is impossible with Coppermine, but there is an odd feature that, with a bit of hackery, can almost be made to work. It’s a bit trickery, but let me see if I can explain quickly.

An album is a folder that can have photos added to it. Albums have text descriptions. Each album can be specially associated with a keyword. Any photos added to any other album that are tagged with that keyword are treated as though they are a member of this special album too.

So, all I need to do is to create a Category called “Subjects”. Then I need to create one album in this category per unique subject in my photos (over 1300 to date). The album name can be the name of the subject. The album’s associated keyword would be the OneWordifiedVersion of the subject’s name. The album’s description could be the HTML which describes the subject, where their home page is, and other sites where you could find photos of them.

Except the album description is plain-text, not HTML. All the URLs would have to appear as text to the user. Drats, so close. I wonder how long it would take me to deactivate all the security-inspired escaping of the text to let the text be rendered as HTML.

The whole situation is a bit clumsy, and will require hand-coded utilities to maintain it, but feasible.

[Stop Press: I’ve realised it still doesn’t work. If you click on a keyword, it takes you to a search result for all photos with that keyword, rather than taking you to an album that has than keyword. Hence, the description still isn’t displayed. That sounds like a possible, but non-trivial, issue to fix.]

Privacy

The Privacy situation seems to be handled very well. I can have users with individual passwords that can belong to multiple groups. An album can be open or restricted to the members of a single group. (There are also special case groups like “Me only”, “Registered Users only”, etc.)

Combined with a robots.txt file to ward off the bots, this handles all four of the privacy scenarios I suggested.

It does mean that you need to manually register all of your Vegas buddies (or have them self-register). I am aware that this is adding to the problem of too many accounts, and I looked for an OpenID plugin, but none was to be found.

Clutter, Themes and Plugins

There a number of issues that I expect can be remedied by creating a new theme and culling the display of some of the features.

For example, I find displaying an array of random pictures on the home-page to be both cluttered and distracting. (I expect people to turn up with a mission to see the photos from a particular event, or photos of a particular person, not just random photos of Aunt Maude.)

The array of “Recently Uploaded” pictures is likely to be more useful, but ideally it would be “Albums with Recently Added Pictures” rather than “Recently Added Pictures”. If I can’t manage that, I’ll just drop the feature entirely.

Each photo has a link to the album which contains it, and also a subtle link to the user who uploaded it. Given I expect to be the only such user, that extraneous link can be dropped.

The subjects (keywords) of the photos are difficult to find. I will make these more prominent. At the same time, I will drop a lot of the other file information. (Size in bytes, pixel dimensions, etc. are rarely required and can be found by looking at the image file’s properties rather than cluttering the HTML. Date uploaded will be irrelevant if most of the images were uploaded during the migration.)

When displaying thumbnails, a lot of the padding and spacing could be reduced. Whitespace is often nice for clarity, but where the goal is to display albums of photos, I want more of the page dedicated to that job.

I want to make some select additions to the clutter as well: If you display an album in a list, its description is displayed. Oddly, when you look at all the photos in an album, its description is not displayed. That seems like an obvious time to display it. I would like to remedy that in the theme.

I haven’t done more than 60 seconds investigation into te effort of creating a new theme; I assume it is on par with a WordPress theme (both in difficulty and capability). I have created a couple of WordPress themes (You’re soaking in it.) but with few accolades about my skills. If I can’t do it with the theme, I am sure I could do with plugins, or plain code hacks.

Talking of plugins, I haven’t noticed much of a vibrant plugin development community. I’ve probably been spoilt with WordPress that has at least five competing plugins for every simple idea.

Summary

It’s going to take some work to customise this to my liking, but it is certainly doable, and I see that there’d be an incremental strategy to get there. I am feeling better about Coppermine than my most recent evaluation.

It’s winning so far…