“A lot of my experimentation lately has been about graphics:
cameras, printers, and scanners. It dawned on me that it was time
to do something productive with all those toys. I decided to put
together an online photo album so that friends and family could
easily keep up with the latest happenings in my life, and maybe
share rare old family photos that up until now could be enjoyed
only in person.”
“I began my latest expedition the same way I’ve started many
others, by visiting Freshmeat.net. Searching for “album” returned
almost 60 possibilities. I’m sure that I missed a lot of good ones,
but I quickly found one that not only had the features I wanted,
but also had precious few dependencies, and promised to be easy
enough for even a dweeb journalist to install. So I chose LiveFrame
Gallery, an application for Web-based photo albums. It is under the
GPL, and was written and maintained by James Home.”
“The application consists of a Perl script, a handful of
templates to control how the pages look when displayed, and a
couple of configuration files. Of course you need to have access to
a Web server in order to use LiveFrame Gallery. Since I wanted to
display thumbnails in the albums, I also downloaded and installed a
copy of ImageMagick. According to the LiveFrame Gallery homepage,
future versions will include everything needed to handle batch
image processing for the creation of thumbnails, but it’s not soup
yet. In the meantime, there are at least two Perl script add-ons
for LiveFrame that handle a lot of the drudgery of manually sizing
photos and creating thumbnails. You can find both of them on the
Contributions page of the LiveFrame Gallery Website.”