to XMP or not to XMP (part I)

Ok, so I've got my mp3s organized. What's next? Well, I'm really overdue getting my pictures in order and that's what I decided to tackle last week.

Here are my main objectives:

• Private storage. The various web services are pretty good and feature rich but I really don't want to trust my pictures to somebody else.
• Archive originals. I want to keep my originals completely intact. Edits will always be done to copies.
  
• Detect duplicates. Pictures have a habit of multiplying onto every writable device you have.
• Tagging. I want to be able to search through my collection based on people, things, locations, events and anything else notable.
• Editing. I don't need anything complicated, just the basics: crop, resize, color adjustment, red eye removal and rotate.
  
• Sharing. Even though I don't want to trust online services for preserving my memories, I do eventually want others to see them.

If I was thinking clearly, I would have thought about each of these points and started at the beginning by answering the question "How do I get my pictures from my camera into an archive?" Instead, I jumped right in and tried installing Gallery 2.

Gallery 2 is just a single piece of a much larger "web server" puzzle. To run Gallery 2 you need a web server (Apache), a database (MySQL or PostgreSQL), PHP, and some graphic libraries (ImageMagick or NetPBM). You don't have to use these specific components but they are probably your best choices. I'm sure if I had read the Gallery documentation a little more carefully I would have realized it didn't quite cover everything I wanted but who does that, right?

I downloaded Apache and installed it on my server computer, easy. Next I downloaded PHP and installed that.. easy again. I had used MySQL before and knew that would be easy so I decided to try Postgres because I had read good things and wanted to try it.. and what do you know?.. more easy! This was going pretty good.

The next step was the big one, installing Gallery. To their credit, they are one of the best documented open source projects I've encountered in awhile. They have a very good help file that gives you detailed step-by-step instructions on how to install it. It got a little confusing in parts when they try to explain the different steps depending on which components you use but it is light years ahead of most walk-thrus you will find. There is alot to read though and you must read everything or you will have problems.

Finally, I got to the 'setup' part where you actually run a gallery .php script through your web browser served up by your apache server (or whatever you are using as a web server) and it will take you through all the steps and checks to get Gallery configured and running. This was all going good too until I got to the part that asked for the DB info. No matter what I did, it could not talk to my Postgres server. I spent many hours trying to find information on the web but in the end, I had to bite the bullet and install MySQL. Once I did that, everything went fairly smoothly.

Gallery runs very well and I recommend it to anyone that wants to serve up their own web albums. You can customize it quite a bit and set up finely controlled permissions for users. Be prepared to dedicate the better part of a day installing it and getting it running. As good as the documentation is, you will need to know what you are doing.

I immediately logged in and started uploading pictures after it was all working. It didn't take long to figure out that it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I was hoping I could get it all setup and then go to my wife and say "Look hun! It's easy. You just upload the pictures and then add some tags for each one. You can click here to fix the red-eyes and you are done." Oh well, back to Facebook for now.

I'll get to the XMP stuff in Part II, promise.