Least Significant Bits

A new photo gallery application, along with a bunch of new photos have been posted. Take a look. I also got a new digital camera, and have been (laughably) experimenting with depth of field and its artistic uses.
[image:461 size=preview]

I spent a lot of time trying to install and integrate a beta version of Gallery2. Some of its features are quite nice, including:

• Its Java image upload applet, which makes it trivial to upload large batches of images.
• Its use of modern database technology. It backends to MySQL, not stupid .INI files.
• Its ability to save metadata and comments, in the database no less.
• Its cart system and batch .ZIP download feature.

Other aspects are unappealing, including:

• No RSS feed for new images and comments. Supposedly this will change before final release.
• Clunky layout options, and insistence of a drop-down box for each image thumbnail. This makes it difficult to integrate with a narrow, fixed-width page format.
• Insufficient integration with WordPress. The state of the art appears to be a plugin called Kalimantan. At this point it seems appealing to dump WordPress and get a real CMS, perhaps Drupal or Mambo.

So, instead, I upgraded to Enhanced Simple PHP Gallery. It includes two major innovations over the old gallery: "Friendly URLs" through mod_rewrite, and an administrative interface. Perhaps another time, Gallery2.

One major annoyance of this code base is its failure to encode file names containing URL-unsafe characters. This is still broken in the Enhanced Simple PHP Gallery. This problem wasn't particularly difficult to resolve. However, I had to turn off the mod_rewrite integration, because mod_rewrite seems to have problems propagating file names with ampersands (%26). It will decode ampersands, but without a $%@#& external script, it cannot re-encode them so that they aren't interpreted as part of a query string.

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