OddThinking

Evaluating WordPress‘s readiness to become the CMS behind an online photo database is not a trivial task.

Not a Photoblog

Firstly, I want to point out that I am not looking for a photoblog, per se.

What’s the difference between a photoblog and a photo database? I don’t think the answer is clear-cut, but I see the sweet-spot of photoblogs as having the following attributes:

• posts that are periodic and temporal; it is about the photo you just took yesterday, not your old wedding photos.
• small quantity; here is the best photo I took yesterday, not here are the best hundred.
• you primarily browse via RSS, not via tagging; it’s about “What photos have you taken lately?”, not “What photos do you have of my son?”
• it is often about the story; “Five minutes earlier, this young boy had been playing soccer on the street, when he saw…” There’s associated text.

Here’s an example of a photoblog I subscribe to: The Big Picture from the Boston Globe.

WordPress’s Suitability

WordPress is a blogging engine. Making it work as a photoblog is a smaller step than as a full photo database.

WordPress’s data model includes basic objects like Posts, Pages, Categories, Tags, Archives (which are a filtered lists of excerpts).

If you add one photo per post, use the tags to indicate the subjects, use the categories to indicate the albums, perhaps include relevant EXIF data in the post text and put thumbnail versions in the archives, I guess you would have the basics for a photo database.

It sounds pretty clunky; would WordPress ever make a decent photo database?

The trouble is it is impossible to ever categorically say “no” to that question. It depends on the plugins and (to a smaller extent) the themes. There may be some combination that delivers exactly what I want. There are many plugins that play in the area.

I can’t simply evaluate “WordPress” as a single entity.

My solution to this was to conduct a mini-evaluation to find the best plugin family.

I did a quick search, made a cursory inspection of dozens of plugins, and selected the most likely five.

If I can’t find a feasible solution with any those plugins, I will walk away; the cost-benefit of further investigation is unlikely to be more positive than looking elsewhere.

The plugins I looked at were:

• Yet Another Photoblog
• PhotoQ
• DM Albums
• Galleria WP
• G4B Photo Gallery

Here are my mini-evaluations of each.

Yet Another Photoblog (YAPB)

This plug-in was the first I looked at, and straight off the bat, it delivered exactly what I expected – the architecture I described above. It include large versions of photos in the individual pages, and thumbnails in the feeds, and medium sized shots in the archives.

Each upload is done individually, integrated to the WordPress post-writing mechanism, but separate from WordPress’s normal media-handling.

It reinforced that there needed to be a lot of work on the theme; the focus needs to be moved away from the title of the post, and who wrote the post, and moved back towards the photo itself.

Talking of titles, every post needs to have a title manually added.

There was no support for slideshows.

Overall, the plugin had a quality feel. I was off to a good start.

PhotoQ

PhotoQ was the second one I looked at. It did everything that YAPB did, and more.

Unlike YAPB, it eschewed the standard WordPress post-writing mechanism for a separate interface for publishing photos.

The title defaults to the filename. Uploads can be batched, rather than one at a time. Publishing the photos can also be batched, so I can release an album at a time.

Again, there was a quality feel to this plugin, although I did suffer from a well-published issue with Flash version compatibility. (I didn’t attempt to resolve it, I just worked around it by changing browsers.)

Overall, PhotoQ worked better than I expected at implementing the architecture I described. That said, it still wasn’t nearly as clean as dedicated photo sites. I still think this is fixable in the template, but the more I look the more work I see there.

Slideshows are still missing.

DM Albums

DM Albums uses a different architecture. It inserts entire albums into posts, wherever a special code is inserted. The code takes parameters, to allow you to shape it to certain criteria.

It didn’t sound like a very good fit to my needs. I never really understood how the photos would be supplied to the tool. (Are all the photos really just dumped in one directory?)

In the end, a bug (compatibility issue?) meant the pages wouldn’t render without a call to an undefined function, and the tool never worked.

At that point, I moved on, without any attempt to resolve it.

Galleria WP

I never installed Galleria WP.

It is designed to insert pretty albums within a post, much like DM Albums.

It can handle restricting the photos by tags, but those tags don’t use the standard WordPress meta-data schema. Instead the tags are hidden in the title of the photos, stored in the standard WordPress media database. That means all the advantages of RSS feeds are lost. It also means I would need to manually create a page per subject to get an album. I have hundreds of subjects, and adding more should be a trivial transaction.

Unacceptable. Moving on…

G4B Photo Gallery

I didn’t install G4B Photo Gallery, and it got a fairly perfunctory inspection.

It appears to take a third approach.

Rather than use WordPress’s media library to store the images (like Galleria WP), it stores its own copy of the media (like PhotoQ PhotoBlog). Rather than using WordPress’s categories and posts to manage the images (like PhotoQ PhotoBlog), it it inserts albums inside posts with codes (like Galleria WP).

This seems to be the worst of both worlds. In particular, tags are missing from photos.

Using WordPress as a photodatabase CMS isn’t ideal.

The winning plugin was PhotoQ.

I will fill in a proper evaluation form for this plugin, soon.

I am so not looking forward to evaluating Drupal. Same plugin and theme issues as WordPress, with less personal experience, and a history of being confused by its competing plugins.