Put the family album online with Linux
This column stems from a gift a reader sent me. I blamed my wild-eyed prognostications for 2001 on dreams I had one night after enjoying some particularly potent habanero peppers. After finding out that I really liked the hot stuff, the reader sent me a sampler of Panamanian habanero salsas. Wow! I tried some of that hot salsa on my Sunday omelet and it burned the "same-old, same-old" right out of me. In fact, it put me in a different mood completely. After that breakfast, I needed to experiment, to find and try new applications I had never seen before, to do something novel. As my namesake Papa Jack would say, "I had them pioneer blues."
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 (see Resources for a link). 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 (see Resources for a link).
Setting up LiveFrame on my Web server was easy. Use the instructions from the Website if you're going to install it. I'm itemizing the steps I took only to show how easy installation is.
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