Robert’s Photography Blog

WordPress is fantastic software for blogging. However, it has few features for integrating photos or galleries. A photo blogger is left with a number of sub-optimum choices such as pasting in photos, linking to an external gallery, or integrating a gallery manually or via a WordPress plugin.

The last two choices require maintaining separate galleries – either on a commercial site (PBase, Flickr, SmugMug, etc.) or using open source software (Gallery, Coppermine, Zenphoto, etc.). The commercial sites don’t integrate well with WordPress nor do they allow you harmonize the ‘look and feel’.

I have been looking at the open source software choices for months. They all have one big negative feature – the requirement for a MySQL database. OK, OK – a database is the right way to store and sort a large number of photos. However, I am not starting my own PBase. I just want small, lightweight galleries to supplement this blog. A database driven gallery means extra cost and complicated set-up. Also, moving or replicating the installation is a major hassle.

‘Singapore’ is an open source, template-driven, image gallery web application written in PHP and is licensed under the GNU (General Public License). It does NOT require a MySQL database (optional) because all image information can be stored in flat text CSV files. Tamlyn Rhodes (based in the UK) is the founder and lead developer of ‘singapore’.

Here is a list of key features:

Can store image info in CSV files on server (no database), or
Can store image info in a MySQL database, or
Can store image info in directory and file names (no setup), or
Can function without any extra image info.
XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 compatible output no JavaScript and no cookies).
Works on a domain or sub-domain.
Multi-language support (over 25 translations currently available).
Fully template-driven with several templates available for download.
Very easy setup and easy-to-integrate into existing websites.
Web based admin to add, delete & edit images and galleries.
Add images via admin interface or ftp.
Automatic thumbnails generation (requires GD or ImageMagick).
Image and gallery viewing statistics.
Allows sub-galleries and sub-categories.
User defined image information such as location taken, camera used etc.
Clear, logical, object oriented code that is easy to modify and customize.

What’s the downside? What’s missing? There are two key features that have not yet been implemented – commenting and EXIF extraction. Commenting/rating will be added soon. However, Tamlyn is ‘backpeddling’ a bit on the EXIF issue. This feature is more difficult to implement and will most likely be added later. The most current version is 0.10.0.

Unknown issues? Indexing by search engines, tagging, etc. I’ll post an update about this latter.

I am in the process of moving all the post-related photos to the new gallery. The old links will be maintained until the seach engines re-index the site and bury their old records. Obviously, all photos related to new posts will go to the new gallery also.

My new gallery with a customized style sheet is here. In the future, just use the ‘Photo Galleries’ link on the navigation bar.

Robert’s Rating: