PHOTO ORGANIZER
News
I decided to hand over the ownership of Photo Organizer to Solomon Peachy, who set up a new site to host the project at: http://po.shaftnet.org. Please use this new site to report problems and wanted features.
The reason behind all this is that I have neglected Photo Organizer lately, making only 3 releases this year, and Solomon was willing to take the project over and dedicate more time to it, than I do. This is good for you :)
I will keep these pages alive for your reference, and I will also contribute from time to time to the project and support people as my time permits.
The Last Release Published on this Site
The bug fixes in the 2.29.B release are the following:
- Install script platformization.
- Separate ICC Profiles for each camera.
- Sub Albums.
- Extended ImageMagic sharpening options.
- Introduced the Orphanage - to store photos that are no longer needed but referenced in a shop transaction.
- Fixed the Shop Item Generator to allow the removal of shop items that were referenced in a shop transaction.
- Some Shop Module bug fixes - including the Download Expiry Date date fix.
You must have PostgreSQL 7.4.2 and PHP 5.0.0 installed in order to get it working properly. To use the watermarking feature you must also have ImageMagick 6.0.6 or later. It is possible to install the software manually and use it with older PHP and PostgreSQL, but if you run into trouble I won't be able to help you.
If you found Photo Organizer useful, there is an easy way to express your gratitude and boost my morale. So if you feel like you want to send me a present, please visit my Amazon.co.uk wishlist and send me an item of your choice. Thanks!
You can try out Photo Organizer whitout downloading and installing a single file on your computer. The online demo is a fully functional version of Photo Organizer, allowing you to create your own user account and discover the features of the software.
Features
Photo management
Naturally the main feature of the software is photo
management. The system will allow you to store and retrieve photos in three sizes (original, midsize and thumbnail) For each photo detailed information is stored such as: Title, Caption, Keywords, Shooting location, Exposure Date, Equipment used, Equipment settings, Storage location and
more. The system supports, photo version control, duplicates, and submission history, so tracking where the photo was submitted has been never easier. Photos can be ranked so that they can be displayed in the order of their relevance. Photos can be organized into folders and albums - kind of virtual folders.
Image files are stored in an image repository with automatic volume manager which makes Photo Organizer more secure (as access to the image files is permitted only via PO) and to ease the upload porcedure, a bulk upload mechanism was added with XML, XMP, IPTC and EXIF metadata import. Shooting data converters from NKN, TXT and SDF into XML provides compatibility with your exisiting database.
Thanks to Dave Coffin's RAW image decoder Photo Organizer supports most RAW digital camera formats, enabling users to store original RAW files in the system's database.
Client Management, Shop Module and Date book
The system has Client Management interface with
onlineclient registration. Photos can be shared with Clients and non registered visitors. Access rights on Folder, Album or Photo level provides control over the visibility of each photo. Clients will be able to access protected photos, not visible for non registered visitors.
Printing
Printing is one of the key features of Photo Organizer. You can create color
brochures, including your photos in PDF and PS formats. Additionally you can print labels
containing the shooting data and the bar coded photo identifier, which enables mass processing, easy data input and quick search of your photos. All this online from your browser.
Search
A simple but powerful search engine is built into
Photo Organizer. Supports basic logic operators (AND, OR and NOT) and allows the query of photos, folders and albums or users. It also implements stemming, to include related variations of your keywords.
Upcoming Features
The development goes on. I have a list of features which I want to add to Photo Organizer in order to improve response times and reduce dependences on other software components (for instance we are going to support multiple database platforms).
I value your opinion and suggestions, therefore I created a thread called Wanted Features where you can post your thoughts and ideas.
Design Principles
Software designers often fell in the trap of reinventing the wheel each time they design something, hoping that their implementation will be better and more reliable, which is seldom the case. This must be some kind of pride so that they can say " I did it ... and alone".
I tried to avoid this common mistake while designing Photo Organizer. I wanted to build this system on a solid and reliable base writing as little custom code as possible since shorter code yields less bugs, development time is reduced and I am free to think about genuine problems rather then solving issues which other people already solved.
The flexible architecture of Photo Organizer will allow the program to run on a single computer or on a cluster of computers. To achieve this scalable architecture the system was built upon the following software components:
- PostgreSQL - obviously. This database is the best and most reliable open source SQL server. Photo Organizer benefits from its transaction support, keeping your data consistent even if the system would fail.
- PHP - the Hypertext Preprocessor.
- Apache HTTP Server - the number one HTTP server on the Internet. This is the main engine executing the PHP code.
- ImageMagick
- Dave Coffin's dcraw image decoder.
- mail transfer agent - if you wish to use e-mail notifications.
- ps2pdf
- gtar - standard GNU tar, usually comes with all major Linux distributions.
- unzip - standard GNU unzip.
Photo Organizer will provide a stable and reliable platform you can rely on for the years to come. You, as a photographer, are not particularly interested in database and web servers, but you want to make sure that the captioning you do today on your photos, will be still available in ten years time on your new 1/4 inch thin laptop. You equally want to make sure that once you have uploaded a photo you don't loose it, just because your hard drive failed. Once installed you will be able to access the system from any network connected computer, capable of running a web browser.
Report a Bug
There is no perfect software. No matter what the vendor says the software you buy will always contain bugs. And Photo Organizer is no exception, I have to admit that there are and always will be bugs in this software.
That being said, I am interested in improving Photo Organizer and fix it's bugs as soon as time permits. To keep score of the malfcuntions I have created a bill board named Bug Reports where you can submit bugs and follow the progress of your reports.
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