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[Snarglefarg]

Although Media Center has photo management, I started thinking about the popularity of online photo albums and it occurred to me that it would be amazing if MC along with the Media Server could be used publish photo albums. In a sense, the Media Server would become a web server but with the power of Media Center behind it, we could create dynamic photo albums automatically generated when the page is hit, based on various criteria and tags of the images.

I recently purchased a digital camera (Nikon Coolpix 4500) and would love to be able to share more pictures than I can with the limited space on my website. My provider only allows 100MB of space. Fine for a standard website, but not enough if you want to publish hundreds, or even thousands of pictures.

Hard drives are cheap and my local drive has plenty of space. Providing links from my site to the Media Server would allow me make all of my photos available to my friends, family and the casual browser.

Any thoughts?

[nila]

For what your talking about to happen, u'd need to be running MC on the server.
I therefore presume your talking about making your computer the server.

In this case why not just set up apache, (pretty easy) and then set up the website normally yourself on your computer anyway?

[Snarglefarg]

For what your talking about to happen, u'd need to be running MC on the server.
I therefore presume your talking about making your computer the server.

Correct.

In this case why not just set up apache, (pretty easy) and then set up the website normally yourself on your computer anyway?

It's not just a hard drive space issue or a server issue, but a content creation issue as well. There are a lot of tools that let you import pictures and then output static album pages.  I was looking for it to be a bit more dynamic, so if for instance I've got pictures of my family, adding more pictures to Media Center and tagging them as "Family" would automatically update the content of the album without having to regenerate pages.

[nila]

Yeah,
I hear what your saying, I've been asking for this for ages myself.


I'm not too into the flat html page output we get out.

What u can do (dunno how good u are at programming, is export to XML, then use that to make your own site - it would depend on your programming skills though.

[Wobbley]

I'm working on some ASP.NET stuff that does just what you're looking for (must run .NET), but obviously doesn't work with MC.  You have to be tunning IIS and .NET platform, but I'll share code w/ you when I am done, if you're interested.

Wobbley

[Snarglefarg]

I'm working on some ASP.NET stuff that does just what you're looking for...

[snip]

...but I'll share code w/ you when I am done, if you're interested.

I knew I couldn't have been the only one to think about this. Yes, I would be very interested.  Feel free to contact me.

[nila]

Why .net and IIS?

APACHE BABY!!!!

and PHP !!!!!

I think I'm gonna have to throw something together myself that will do this.

The thing I dont like about it is I can get the data one way - from MC to the website, but I cant then update MC with the data from the website which I find ANNOYING as I plan to let all my friends view the files and tag them (add themselves as the people etc) so that it's not a case of sitting down and manually tagging tons of pictures by myself but rather of letting people just tag them as they go along - sooo much nicer and less nerdy - I dont want to be tagging all day of my life

[nila]

I've started making something in php to do this.

So far I've got it so it can parse the XML for all the field names and then create the mySQL table automatically.
It can also identify each item.

Now I just gotta get it so it can get all the values for each field and insert these into the SQL and it'll be done.

My library is a bad one for testing though

My library is 90 megs so takes ages to read in

[Snarglefarg]

I've started making something in php to do this.

So far I've got it so it can parse the XML for all the field names...

I'm not well versed with the way that the database is stored, but are you able to read the "live" database directly or are you using the XML export?  Ultimately, the best case scenario would be to read the database directly so that an export would not be required each time an update is made.

[Wobbley]

Actually,

One version of what I'm working on imports tag info from directory (and sub-directory) of mp3 files into MS SQL Server 2000 (so you've got to make sure you tag your files accurately in MC), sets up a relational DB with 3 degree normalized tables, then the asp.net pages use the sql data to build dynamic web-based music library. Another version takes exported XML library data from MC and applies XLST to create webpage of mp3s (with album art, bios, etc., if they exist). Ultimately, I want a portion to run as a service and monitor a user-defined folder (and it's subfodlers if they exist) and make updates (add/change/delete) to the db automatically so the webpages are always up to date.

Wobbley

[nila]

Wobbley,
It sounds REALLY good

Pity your doing it with IIS as I'm not gonna switch the whole setup I have

I'd love to test it out.

Maybe after you do it send me your pages and I'll try make a php version??

I found one php script that'll read your dir's and stuff directly and make a db, it was quite a good one, just lacked a few features that I wanted.

[nila]

Hey wobbley,

How's it going for you?

U having much progress on it?

I made a script that'll parse the XML but it takes a while to execute on my library (it's 50 megs and it takes approximately 4 minutes to parse it all - thats a bit long).

The other big problem is, fair enough it takes 4 minutes to parse it, I shouldn't be having to do that tooo often hopefully.
The problem is though there is no way to then get the information back into MC if we update it on the website via visitors.

[nila]

Yo,
have a look at how I did it for the parsing if u want and tell me if u can see any ways I could speed it up a lot if u dont mind


http://www.britcrew.com/temp/ss.php?a=index.phps

All comments welcomed

That gets it into the db, now I gotta write something to manage it and to sort it into more appropriate tables.

I was thinking about making it present the user with a list of all the fields with 3 check boxes: audio, video, image

and they have to check whichever boxes they want to use for each file format.
I'd then seperate the data into 3 tables for each type, then maybe try make the music relational for albums?

[nila]

Well it now shows the user all the fields and lets them choose with media type each field should belong to.

After they select the fields per media type it then parses the XML, creates three tables for each media type and inserts each file into the appropriate table.

At that point it's in mySQL seperated into the types.

Next step is creating some soft of pages to browse and query the db.

I can even get php to resize the images from your originals and create the thumbs etc but the problem is php is SLOW for this type of stuff.


U having any luck with yours Wobbley?
How's it going? Is it fast?

I'm thinking about just trying to build a plugin for MC that would either act directly as a server and let it do the queries directly to it, or would automate the process of building the website to either static pages or to database driven ones.

I'd make the .css for the pages external so it can be easily modified to tweak the look of all the pages quickly.

I just gotta see how hard it is to make the plugin. I haven't looked at VB in years.


Any particular features anyone would want?

[Snarglefarg]

I'm thinking about just trying to build a plugin for MC that would either act directly as a server and let it do the queries directly to it, or would automate the process of building the website to either static pages or to database driven ones.

Gee, that sounds familiar.

For me, dynamic pages are much more appealing than static ones since the desire to get away from static pages is what prompted me to think about Photo Albums.

Ultimately, I'd like to be able to do two things.  I'd like to be able to perform queries (either a freeform keyword field, or you could use categories using built-in dropdown menus which present the same info that would be displayed by a "column type."

Then, similar to Playlists for music files, I'd like to have my "Photo Albums" which contain a specific list of photos.

This list can either be dymanic:
- Top 10 viewed photos
- Photo's viewed today

My rating for a photo
- All 4 star photos

Rated by the user
- All 4 star photos as rated by web visitors (your ability to send results back to the database would come in handy here)

Pre-fabricated albums
- My trip to Disney World
- Family Reunion 2003

A global control would be handy which would be a "live" or "published" field. Setting this field for images in the database would decide whether this particular picture is available (or suitable) for publication on the web.  

There's a lot of potential here, and if you think of all the ways you can slice and dice music files, I think a lot of that could apply to photos.

Thanks for all of yours (and Wobbley's) hard word on this.

[nila]

lol,
I've been thinking about this for years, only problem is that I haven't touched vb in years either too though so programming in it is a bit dodgy


My php page already does the basics so what I might do is finish that off, combine it with imagemagick so that it can resize and create the images as well, then after that move onto a VB plugin.

I also wanna find out more about the web remote built into MC, someone build a flash program to interface with that - if they can do it with flash it must be possible with php too.

[nila]

Ok,

got it resizing the images now too.

It's taking just under 1 second per image to resize them.


So far it can do this:


1. Parse MC XML and get user to select fields for each media type.
2. Create the mySQL tables for each media type and then insert all the items from the MC db into each table type according to it's media type.
3. Take all the images and create thumbnails and resized originals.


I'm going to add this too which should be easy(ish)
4. Create the dynamically driven webpages for you with a GUI for doing searches
5. Design the pages with an external .css file so that you can easily customise it all.



What else does it need to do? Other than be a lot faster?

[nila]

hmm,
think I've changed my mind about the external .css

I think it'd work better if I created templates that are stored in the db that you can customise via a webpage with options.


Thoughts? Comments?

[Snarglefarg]

How about using forms to make queries?  I've done that in the past to get results from a FileMaker database.

Then you'd need to use a form which will post to the server, using hidden fields to make the queries.

This would make it possible for us to create our own pages, or incorporate them into the look we've already designed for our site, and then drop the form elements on the page where we want the album and controls to appear.

Just a thought.

[nila]

Sikes,

I dont quite follow what you mean?

An examples I can look at?


I think I am going to use .css for the finished pages (was thinking about it last night) and I'm going to put each attribute in a <. div class="field name">Field Info Here<./div> so that the css has a LOT of power, you can customise how each field is going to look individually.
The page will also be customisable via the css obviously.

[Snarglefarg]

Hmm... I could be mistaken. It was a while since that project and it appears that we used forms to make queries to FileMaker but that the results from the queries were placed on the page via tags but rather they were created by the FileMaker server itself.

Sorry, continue on as you were.

[nila]

Unfortunately I haven't been able to do anything on this the last two days.

I've been getting to work at 8.30am and leaving at 11pm.

I've been trying to get some of my debt cleared so working my ass off (freshly graduated student here = flat broke).


The point it's at right now is that it can parse the XML, set up the MC tables (I still need to modify it to make the image tables relational so we can have multiple 'people' etc per image.
It can then create all the thumbnails and main pictures.

Now I just need to get it to create the html (pretty easy).

I'm also going to re-work how it does the whole thing above so that after you enter the db details the first time you use it, it'll then have them permenantly and be able to use them when controlling the photo album.

Maybe I should make an 'admin' side to the photo album like bulletin boards have.

Me and you seem to be the only ones interested in this so if you want to give mine a shot and help me develop it by feedback and comments, you'll need a few basic things - I can help you set them up with any questions u might have.

You'll need these:


Web server (recommend apache) - www.apache.org
mySQL db - www.mysql.com
php - www.php.net
imagemagick - ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/binaries/ImageMagick-5.5.7-Q16-windows-static.exe



Install apache and mySQL, then php after - I can help u set them up
It's gonna take quite a bit to get this going I know, thats why I'd like to build a plugin so that it could build the site and the rest could then just be done on a remote server but the plugin can wait for now.

[Snarglefarg]

Well, the good news is that I've installed and configured all of the programs you listed. (Thanks for the URL's!)  And most importantly, they all seem to work!

PHP was a little tough to get going (I ended up installing 5.0 beta) but I managed.

The bad news is that I don't have much spare time, but I'll do what I can to help out.

[nila]

ooh, wouldn't recommend v5 - it's VERY beta and I've heard a lot of problems with it.

Sorry you needed so many programs - if I can work out how to talk to MC like Glissando does then it wouldn't be necessary for apache as MC already has the webserver and it wouldn't be necessary for mySQL as MC would be the database.

That'd only leave ImageMagick which, if MC would do the resizing wouldn't be necessary either

[Snarglefarg]

That's what I figured. Since MC already has all of this functionality, these additional programs didn't seem necessary.

It seemed like functionality the authors of MC could build in realitively easily.  They've got the all the pieces already, just a matter of putting them together in the right way.

[nila]

yeah,

I just cant work it out and I cant find anything on the developers forum to answer the questions either.

I tried e-mailing the author of glissando with no luck and had no replies to similar posts asking so for now it's just done this way.

Good thing about this way is that it's perfectly ready to put onto any web host.

U just export your mySQL db, uploading it and your photo's to ur host and ur photo album is online!

[Snarglefarg]

I backed down to PHP 4.x but can't get Perl working for the life of me.  It runs from a command prompt but not within my browser.  I keep getting a 404 error although I know that the path is correct.

I also set the MIME type in the config file for Apache to deal with CGI and PL files (at least I thought I did).  Is it .CGI or .PL that I should be using?  Any ideas if I need to do anything else to get Perl working in my browser?

[nila]

lol.
Glad to see your going for it big time

I haven't put pearl on my system in AGES. Once I started getting into php I had no use for pearl.

You just have to set it to use whatever extension you've configured your system to use for pearl.

I think you can use either/both.

You also have to make sure the directory is specified as a cgi so that the file is executed instead of just being served if I remember correctly

U wont need pearl for my script - I'm gonna try finish it today - it'll not be bug proof but if you use it with common sense it'll work fine or it should.


I hope it works - it's gonna be fun to use

[nila]

Aaaahhh - First MAJOR problem.

It can parse the XML in like 100 items every second or something which is not tooo bad - It takes a little bit for my 10,000 images.

My next problem though is that resizing the images - it takes roughly 2 seconds to make the big image and the thumbnail from the original!!

On 10,000 images that is obviously 20,000 seconds which is 322 minutes - NOT good!!

I dont know how to overcome this either - it's a speed issue with Imagemagick, not my script

[Snarglefarg]

When are you resizing them?  Presumably you're not going to display all 10,000 images on one page, so you can resize them on the fly when the page is loaded with a reasonable number of images.

[nila]

Well I left it doing it overnight to see what would happen and if it could basically just run till they were all done.

It did 1000 then pooped and said 'server cannot be found'. Unfortunately, it didn't display how long it took to do it.

Resizing them on the fly wouldn't really work too well as it'd mean that the pages would take ages to load as it would have to resize the images to display them.

I'm doing it so that it's an initial setup from which point the pages are able to be browsed.

The 'pages' aren't going to have any fixed number of items - they're just going to show whatever they're called to show - thats why it's done dynamically.


I'm gonna have to think of some work around for making the images - it might take just as long but I need something that can comfortably just take as long as it needs to do all the thumbnails and pics.

[nila]

Ah - amendment - It did: 8609 images last night before it pooped!!!

wahey - so basically it did them all. Unfortunately it didn't then display the page which means that my script cant continue gracefully.

I'm not sure how I'm going to get around this, maybe just set it up so if you hit refresh after it poops it knows it just finished doing the images and presents you with the next screen.


Well I now know that it can successfuly process all the images - wahey



Resizing the images dynamically is great in terms of it lets each user decide what size they want the thumbnails and main pics but it just doesn't work in terms of functionality - it might do when we have 10Ghz machines but right now it just puts tooo big a strain on the server to dynamically create the thumbnails each time someone wants them at size X.

The only option u have is to create a few different thumbnails at different sizes and let the user chose between these sizes - I personally just usually stick to one thumbnail size.

[nila]

Hmm

Sorry Sikes - this has taken forever - I've just been working all day recently then doing another job after at night - its keeping me BUSY with little free time to do this.

U been trying anything else meanwhile?

[Snarglefarg]

Funny you should ask. I started searching the web for a nice looking, easy to manage photo album. Although I'd love for there to be integration with MC, I know for now my choices are either to wait, or to find something that works now.

My search lead me to "Coppermine" (http://www.chezgreg.net/coppermine) which in my opinion, is the best looking solution out there. It uses a combination of PHP mySQL and GD2. It supports ImageMagick, but I couldn't get that going. Since inspired me to get all of this stuff going (though at the moment under IIS, not Apache) I thought I'd give it a try.

I've got over 1000 pictures being hosted by my home machine at the moment. It's not dymanic as I'd like if integrated with MC but for now it will have to do. Perhaps joining forces with these guys might help? They seem quite active in development and are developing the ability to integrate their photo album with different message boards. Perhaps they just don't know about MC and once they saw it, they'd see value in supporting it the way we want.

I'm in no way trying to undermine the work you've done but having a "real job" kind of interferes with the fun stuff that we all want to do.

You can see the results of my efforts by looking at my photo album:

http://www.flysoup.com/album

The software allows for rating pictures, it counts view, and add comments. Also, you can view a slide show (with a nice fading effect and send individual images as e-cards... it's quite nice. I had to set up my own SMTP server to handle sending email.

I set it up so that you need to be a member before you can see pictures any larger than a thumbnail. Feel free to join so you can take a look. As a registered user, you're even able to create your own album and post your own pictures on my site. I haven't tried that yet but feel free to try it out if you'd like.

[RhinoBanga]

Nila,

How are you resizing your images?   Maybe I can give you some pointers on how to speed it up??


The reason why I am sticking my oar in here is that I have started to look at creating slideshow cd's/websites for my family and there is nothing out there that really hits the spot (although PhotoShow Deluxe from www.simplestar.com is the best I've found so far).

[nila]

Hey Rhino

I'm using ImageMagick - it's open source I believe - or at least freeware then getting php to call the command line version of it with the correct parameters for each file.

It's working great and probably wouldn't be THAT slow for most people - for me though I have like 8000 photo's from over the years though so it's a long process to resize them all.


I really need like a good solid 3-4 days I think to work on this solidly to get it going and working properly and nicely.

It more or less does all the processing to get all the info from the MC db and to create the tables with the fields etc but as of yet - I haven't implemented the GUI to manage and use the created db and browse the images etc.

I've posted the work I've done so far - you can download the pages here:

http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/php.exe
http://www.hostrus.co.uk/tmp/php.exe
it's a self extracting .rar file

Or you can see the code here:

http://www.pastebin.com/13672

This is the file that sorts the MC db and creates the sql tables etc
It works pretty much - but I cant remember if it's using all the parameters passed yet or if it still uses some I had hard coded in - not too sure - need to refine it - but it pretty much works



http://www.pastebin.com/13673

This is the one that I really haven't started on much yet which is going to be the one that creates the GUI to manage and browse the images etc.

Depending on how good your coding is you could by all means do some of this yourself - the first file should more or less work with a little tweaking.

[RhinoBanga]

I can tell you now that constantly calling a command line program will kill your machine.   WinNT is not as fast as Unix loading up executable images.

What I could do though is write a program that takes a list of files to convert so it can do it in one call ... it would be zippy quick.

The file format would be:

<Source Filename>
<Dest Filename>
<Dest Width>
<Dest Height>
<Future Options ... blank for now>


For Example:

c:\input.jpg
c:\output.jpg
640
480

c:\input2.jpg
c:\output2.jpg
640
480

...
...



Would this be of any use to you?   Of course you would get the source code as well.

Let me know.

[nila]

Cool,

it'd be GREAT to have you working with me Rhino

You are a GREAT programmer - my biggest problem to date is that for me - the main language I program in is PHP so I cant just write a dedicated program to deal with it all. - It's all done via webpage which is going to be great for the browsing etc - but is a pain in the processing stage.


That program would be a BIG help - you could have a look at imagemagick if you want - it's perfect for doing the image manipulations - they have a website.


http://www.imagemagick.org/


If you were to make a program - it'd have to be able to cope with being passed a LOT of images and it'd have to be able to be called via the command line

The advantage of imagemagick - is that I can also use it on the server for the website for when users upload their images to resize them at that point.


Imagemagick with the command calls actually did work fine on my system though for 8000+ images - resized them all perfectly.

What would be GREAT - is if you could do a plugin that would allow information to come from MC without having to first extract the db as a .XML and then process it - so we could just constantly query MC etc.

I'm not really sure how I want to do this - I have a LOT of holliday photo's as I'm sure everyone will start having once they've been collecting them for a few years.

MC provides a great way to manage and tag them but the problem is how to then get this information into a mySQL db so it can be queried via a website and the photo's published to a website.

If MC could do it it'd be great as the information could be kept syncronised - otherwise it's going to have to just be a case of getting whatever inforamation is in MC, and making that the starting point - from there the website information and tagging just builds up on that.


What're your ideas on how to do it etc?
It'd be nice to have another view point.

I have a LOT of images that I need to organise properly and get published.

[RhinoBanga]

Contact me on msn ... RhinoBanga@hotmail.com.

I have nearly finished the app.

It's multithreaded too

[nila]

Hmm - u never seem to be on MSN ?