[KPhotoAlbum] read-only web interface

Risto H. Kurppa risto at kurppa.fi
Mon Mar 26 15:40:03 BST 2007


Hi!

Absolutely a great idea, I'm really looking forward to be able to see
this working!!

> I'm not interested in having photo rankings, user comments, changing
> tags/keywords/whatever now, I'd just like to show a nice interface to my
> friends. It shoud allow as flexible queries as the KPA itself does (and
> even more flexible where possible :) ), but no modifications at all.

Great, this is what I need as well.

> a) What do you think about format of the URLs?

Hmm.. Search Engine Optimization usually 'likes' to see keywords in
the address, like blog.com/i-went-to-see-the-new-car-12-01-2007 or
things like that. But I don't know if this is what people want for
their photoalbums.. I myself would propably prevent search engines
spidering my page (even .htaccess protection..?) but I think it's a
good idea to have the possibility to allow SE:s to index the albums.

domain.com/category/people1,people2/date/image.htm might work.. But
see answer to b)

> b) What is the best way to express stuff like "show me all pics from
> 2001-2004 where I can see Peter with either Alice or Bob, taken by Adam"
> in URLs?

I'd go for parameters, like
index.php?start_year=2001&end_year=2004&people=peter,(alice,bob)&photographer=adam
This would be easy to parse (I hope you're doing this on PHP..?) but
also easy to read and even change and create searches manually by just
editing the URL
The people=peter,(alice,bob) can be a bit more difficult, but might work..

Since the other option would me using some ID:s like
people=25,(62,25)&photographer=62 .. hmm.. This would be easier for
you (AFAIK, the info is stored with some kind of ID:s?) to get the
information but difficult to actually use.

> c) How should the generated web page for specifying b) look like?

Maybe something close to KPA search page? Or ask Heinz  (ping ping?),
he might have some ideas.. But do try to make it simple and fit in one
page so people don't need to go through many steps to make a search.

Maybe the most important thing for me in a web interface would be able
to easily manage images (as well as tags..) shown in the album.. I'd
like (to have a possibility for ) it use a copy of the actual database
(to use a 'real' server vs. my desktop computer) and if I want to
allow people to see only pictures from some parties, say, I want it to
hide all the other tags but also somehow make it easy to copy the
images to web, needed for the party gallery.

> d) I use a traditional convention where a first level of directory
> structure represents event where the pictures were taken, so when I want
> my friends to see stuff from Anna's birthday party, I'd likely point
> them to http://exmaple.org/photoalbum/dir/2007-03-26+Anna's+birthday.
> Problem comes when those names contain non-ASCII characters. Are those
> safe in the path component of the URL? Is there any better option about
> how to specify this kind of "event"?

Hmm.. Would be nice to have the date optional - to allow the user to
modify the naming convetion of the folders (for example
domain.com/albums/grannys-90 etc.)


> Technical stuff -- I like Python and XSLT, I want to write code once and
> do templates later, I don't like SQL much but can use it when it's
> apropriate, I use Apache. It's likely that it will be written in Python
> & mod_python, templates will be in XSLT (mod_transform) for XHTML
> generation and it will be necessary to run a script to generate an
> sqlite db from the KPA's XML file.

Oh, ok, you'll write python and not PHP, ok. Kind of good since you
can assign python scripts to cron to run once a day or something to
create static pages (for example scan through the database to see what
tags actually are used?)

Extension to this is a printable PDF  :)


Great work Jan, please let us know what's going on!


r


-- 
rhk

| risto h. kurppa
| risto at kurppa.fi
| http://risto.kurppa.fi



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