ArticlesWhich requirements does PHPWebGallery 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 | |
| CAT3 | I | Photographs tagged with locations, objects, activities | Y | |
| CAT4 | I | Performers tagged with real and stage names. | Y | |
| CAT5 | I | Attribution of photographer details | Y | “Author” field |
| CAT6 | I | Attribution of copyright owner’s details | N | |
| CAT7 | I | Rating of photographs | Y | |
| CAT8 | I | Sorting/Filtering by rating | Y | But globally across site, not by album |
| CAT9 | D | Albums grouped by type | Y | Only way to access is via tree? Discourages use. |
| CAT10 | D | Albums grouped by date | Y | Manually, clumsy interface |
| CAT11 | D | Areas or points of photograph tagged | N | Tags need to be declared. |
| 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 | Y | |
| CAT16 | D | Attribution of copyright details | N | |
| CAT17 | D | Control over (default) ordering | N | Various sorts available, but not arbitrary one? |
| S+L1 | C | Link to other photos with same tag within an album | Y | |
| 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 | |
| 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 | Although custom permalinks for albums available. |
| COMM1 | D | Multi-user Tagging | N | Having multiple admins doesn’t count. |
| COMM2 | D | Notifications of appearance in photos | N | |
| COMM3 | D | Comments permitted | Y | |
| COMM4 | D | Notification of comments | Y | |
| COMM5 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for comments | Y | Comments + Images in one feed |
| COMM6 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for subjects | N | |
| COMM7 | D | RSS or Atom Feeds for new photos | Y | |
| PQ1 | C | Web-quality images shall be displayed by default. | N | Displays full quality of whatever is uploaded! |
| PQ2 | I | Print-quality images shall be available. | Y | |
| PQ3 | I | Automatically generated thumbnail and web-quality versions. | N | Thumbnails only |
| PQ4 | D | Archive-quality images shall be stored. | ? | Untested. Not plausible if web-quality not generated. |
| PQ5 | D | Custom thumbnails (e.g. choosing to crop over shrinking.) | N | |
| PQ6 | D | Support for short video | Y? | |
| 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 | N | Tags need to be declared. Checkbox of all tags |
| PERF5 | I | < 1 minute face-time per photograph | Y | |
| 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 | Y | |
| 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 | Albums can be declared private, and shown only to customised groups or people. |
| WF1 | I | Hint to original location on my harddrive | Y | |
| WF2 | I | Auto-complete or partial search on tags during input | Y? | Checkbox |
| WF3 | D | Read EXIF data from image | Y | |
| WF4 | D | Support unpublished draft state | Y | |
| MIGR1 | C | API to add photos | Y | Schema available |
| MIGR2 | C | API to add tags | Y | Schema available |
| MIGR3 | I | Tags can be non-specific to areas of photo | N | |
| METR1 | D | “How many visitors?” metric | Y | |
| METR2 | D | “How long does a visitor stay?†metric | N |
Summary
PHPWebGallery was a surprise entrant that I stumbled across while evaluating WordPress plugins.
It is another open-source, PHP-based, self-hosted photo album.
It was actually pretty bloody good, with these tiny failings that render it completely unsuitable.
The first is that it only supports two sizes – thumbnail and original. I need at least three, preferably four sizes: thumbnail, web, print and (optionally) archive versions. Missing the web-sized version is a critical problem.
The other is that it treats tags like categories; it assumes that you are only going to have a couple of dozen at most. It displays them all on the screen with checkboxes to select which ones you want. I used to do something similar (but smarter; a multi-select box, so it didn’t take as much screen real-estate) but I had to stop because it was taken too long to download over 1200 names on every page. This software simply doesn’t scale for large numbers of tags.
It’s other problems could conceivably be fixed with a plug-in or two (E.g. spaces are allowed in tags, but not in the photo filenames!) but these two issues seem pretty fundamental.
It’s a shame. I liked this one. It has real privacy control, the ability to specify the photographer, batch uploads and it bases its world view on a directory structure that you can understand.
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