Forum OpenACS Q&A: Looking for a web photo solution, for mom....

I would like to find (yahoo, ofoto, shutterfly?) or build (OACS 3.2.5, OACS 4.5, ?) a site to share the photos of my kids with my mom. And the world.

Mom's no longer the innovator she used to be. She is using the original WebTV and has a color printer attached to it.

I've perused the ofoto and shutterflys, and they're pretty cool, but definitely oriented around selling you their prints. Ofoto, etc. will not present a page with just the picture on it, and I don't believe my mom (WebTV) has the ability to click right, print photo.

I've checked out hpphoto.com, and that has the new hp stodgy feel to it, but apart from that, it's just what is needed in many respects, including local tools (.exe) to edit photos quickly and a mass upload tool. But it is geared toward printing out photographs on (hp) printers using Windows. To print something out you get to install (ah, summer time and how I like my UPS, but I do wonder if someone just got fried somewhere) a little plug-in to Internet Explorer. Works great, except for WebTV, that funtastic little MIPs machine.

Yahoo and myfamily.com provide a solution of sorts, except that to keep any real amount of data on those sites gets pretty pricey pretty quickly and it's not real clear I can get as much space as I want anyway. I have a nifty Fuji 2800 digital camera that can take really bad avis that are just wonderful. They are really bad in terms of frame size and frame rate, and they can only be 60 seconds long, but they have sound, and it makes it trivial to capture video and pictures and that's wonderful. A 60 second avi is 10Mb though. Well mom can't watch that anyway on her WebTV, but everyone else can.

Probably the easiest thing to do is buy her a damned pc and pay for an AOL account. Easiest, but not really an affordable solution either, and I really don't want to become the AOL help desk.

It's usually at this point, I just return all the digital toys and go back to film, vhs, and Costco developing.

Is there no web site or service that is reasonably priced and that I don't have to write or build myself?

In the build-it-yourself department, there is the ACS of course. I've built my own custom photo module for ACS 3.2.5 in the past, and I've implemented Andrew Grumet's photo module for the ACS before, but I would prefer to do something 4.5ish.

What's the scoop then? I want to get mom all setup, but I do have a paying job and other responsibilities. For a quick "time to mom", should I: OpenACS 3.2.5 or OpenACS 4.5? Do the 4.5 photo album and photo album lite modules work with 4.5? Do they work with postgres?

Is there some prebuilt home photo server thing I can buy and install on Windows? Is there another photo website I should check out?

Thanks,

It's not the interface that keeps me away from yahoo.  I'd prefer a yahoo solution over a doit-my-self solution.

It's the disk space size limitations that are the deal breaker.  A feature of the original Phillip Greenspun photo software was the ability to maintain different sizes of images and let folks pick what they want to see.  I really like that, but it adds up to lots and lots of disk space.  I do like making movies available too -- and those are 10Mb a piece.  It appears that yahoo will only sell me 100Mb (and that for $35 per year).  In the words of Hans and Frans, puny.  Myfamily.com  pumps that up to 500Mb, but they want $100 a year for that.  That would almost be worth it except for myfamily.com's completely hid interfaces and their pop-up advertising.

Jerry,
I'm afraid I don't know of a good solution for your mom. I just wanted to inform you guys of a photo application that I have built for my own use that I call Photo Archive. My use-case is that I have thousands of jpgs about 300-500 kbyte in size that I have taken with my Canon Ixus (such as the ones taken at the recent OpenACS social in Amsterdam...I will announce them as soon as they are on the server). I have organized the photos into folders and I wanted to make those photos browsable on the web. Unfortunately my Photo Archive application still lacks important features such as photo meta-data and uploading via the web. I am just about about to add rotation of photos and I have recently added the ability to specify which folders should be viewable by logged in users only and which should be viable by all users. I hope to be able to publish this little app this week in my copious free time...😊

Jeff, Peter,

Please let me know how I can help.  I'd prefer not to have my photos stored in 20 different formats in 40 different places subject to 4 different business plans and vc financing. I'd prefer to have them on my own server, in one well known location and have software that managed the differently requested formats (maybe on the fly.)

Regarding voice annotations, the Fuji camera I have just creates a .wav (it's a very Windows oriented camera) with the same name as the .jpgs.  Movies are .avis.  The basic settings of the Fuji drivers just offload all the photos from the camera into the same directory.  I will be happy to send you some files if you wish.  The real question is if there is any standard or if all the camera manufacturers are just coming up with their own.  Are their AVI players for the Mac or for Linux?  If not it would be nice to have a utility in the workflow that could convert from AVI to MPEG.

I know that it's dangerous to start talking about other desired features, that's a forum discussion that comes up every few months....

I have bulk uploads working and am working on the metadata stuff and some other nice things.

Jeff - How are you doing bulk uploads? I was looking for a Web-based batch upload solution about a month ago ( https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0004s8&topic_id=OpenACS&topic=11), but I didn't find a usable one -- we settled for a client side app.

I love gallery for keeping track of photos.

It's a php/cgi solution, so

time to mom = elegance = maintenance = nil

Also, it's skinable, very popular and under active development.

JS

Or what about getting her an iMac with all the integrated iApps? I just love mine and it runs *Nix too and it just works!!! And with the Mac, you can access to iTool for free!!! Check out some homepages built in minutes at http://homepage.mac.com/javes and http://homepage.mac.com/javes2. And its certified to be mom-proof - since my sis-in-law, who is not a computer guru by any measure, managed to pull together some of the albums on those two sites.

All it took was plugging in the Digital Camera on the Mac. It automatically powers up iPhoto and creates a Photo Album. And then, there's a SHARE option with Homepage as a destination - and voila! An Internet Photo Album in minutes.

I thinks Apple pulled a coup by integrating *Nix with a Consumer OS, while preserving the elegance of Apple's Industrial Design.

And best of all, you can even run a OpenACS off it to do some other stuff since PostgreSQL and AOLServer do run on OS X.

I'm actually working on porting Lar's stuff (www.pinds.com) to OS X and then doing a little AppleScript thingy to push iPhoto pictures into the OpenACS Photo Album for a more sophisticated Photo Album with ratings, long captions and all.

Once that's done, I can blog and do pictures the OpenACS/Lar's way with the help of Dynamic DNS off my iMac.

Alternatively, you can give her a Ceiva Picture Frame. It dials up and downloads pictures off your Ceiva account. Pretty neat but a bit expensive.

Hope this helps!

I saw a page that let you send photos to shutterfly to order prints at a gallery (php) site (http://www.avarachen.net/gallery/screenshots/aac but I could not find anywhere on shutterfly where you could get a form pointed at the action for the form on the avarachen.net page (although it does indeed seem to work).

My parents actually got a spiral bound book of 4x6's from them and I was reasonably happy with the results (some photos probably should have been manipulated in photoshop first but life is too short).

It's pretty neat to hear of these various efforts that have different amounts of integration with commercial services.  What would be very nice is to learn if there is any effort to create a web api (soap) to enable client apps to upload/manage photos at a photo serving sites, and to allow photo serving sites to request prints, etc., from the various photo printing sites.

If there is such a standard being developed, our photo albums modules should support them.  If there is no such standard being developed, it would be terrific for all parties to get involved and start one.

Something similar to this was announced late last year.

An imaging industry group call I3A announced the Common Picture Exchange Environment (CPXe) for moving photos between cameras and online storage/printing services.

http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,41720,00.html

Its pretty new, so I wouldn't rush out and write a service contract for it necessarily, but it looks like it's got some steam. Also, its not clear whether you have to be a company (pay $$$) to play with their network. It would certainly be a shame if that were the case.

Jeff,
Do you have anything done on your photo album? I'm looking for one that does what yours does and would be willing to contribute to this. Tell me if you need any help.

** Martin

Yes. That is just about exactly what I'm looking for. Except for the oracle port, I can help you finish up anything you want. You need any help? I'm rather. . .uhm. . .not busy and can spend lots of time on it (unless I happen to get a job that wants to hire me instantly).

** Martin