Coppermine Gallery

As you may know, I’m using Coppermine as my photo gallery.

Since WinXP days, I have been using xp_publish feature of Coppermine to tie into the publishing wizard of windows to upload photos to publish them to albums on Coppermine.

Changes are required for Vista and Windows 7. I’ll cover all the changes you need to allow you to upload your photos using these systems and Coppermine.

Using Windows XP

Just to cover all the history, here’s the way this works under Windows XP.

The instructions for using the feature are found by going to http://yourdomain.com/yourcoppermine/xp_publish.php

and following the instructions. These involve downloading a REG file which is then added to the registry. Notice the registry path in the following example.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
PublishingWizard\PublishingWizard\Providers\YOUR COPPERMINE Photos]
"displayname"="Your Coppermine Title"
"description"="Your Coppermine Description"
"href"="http://Yourdomain/yourcoppermine/xp_publish.php?cmd=publish"
"icon"="http://yourdomain/favicon.ico"

Publishing in WinXp is pretty easy.

1. In one of your photo folders, click the Folders button to display the Picture Tasks pane on the left.
2. Select the photos you would like to publish to Coppermine.
3. Choose Publish the Selected Items to the Web.
4. This starts the wizard that allows you to choose your coppermine site from a list of choices and then upload your photos to an existing or newly created album.

Changes for Vista and Windows 7

For Vista and Windows 7, the feature was renamed from Publish to “Order Prints”, and the registry key was changed. Here’s the Vista / Windows 7 version.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\
PublishingWizard\InternetPhotoPrinting\Providers\Your Coppermine Title]
"displayname"="Your coppermine title"
"description"="Your coppermine description"
"href"="http://yourdomain/yourcoppermine/xp_publish.php?cmd=publish"
"icon"="http://yourdomain/favicon.ico"

Notice that the registry key has changed. You will need to manually edit the reg file before you apply it to the system.

It may be that the “Publish to the Web” feature was removed in Vista and this changes your site to a server for “Ordering Prints”.

Publishing in Vista

To publish in Vista, the steps are a little different.

1. In the file explorer, navigate to your photos, and preview one of the photos.
2. In the top left of the preview window, choose Go to Gallery.
3. In the gallery window, select the photos you would like to publish.
4. In the print menu at the top, choose Order Prints. You will notice the second time you use this that your choice will be brought out into the menu.
5. This activates the choices again with your choice highlighted and when you click Next.
6. The Coppermine Publishing wizard starts as before with a login screen.
7. In Vista, the protocol has apparently changed, but Coppermine has not been updated. At least not for versions 1.4.x.
8. If you create a new album, then the wizard will create the album and stop. In this case just run the wizard again, and choose the album from the list. It will work this time. Alternatively, you can create the album on the coppermine site and then run the wizard to publish the photos.
9. If you choose an album that exists from the list, then the wizard will continue and upload the photos.

You probably won’t be able to publish full size photos to your website this way since they will exceed a limit of 2 or 4 MB that you or php may have set for your site. In this case you will need to use Filezilla or another FTP client to upload your photos and then Batch Upload in Coppermine to assign the photos to an album.

Publishing in Windows 7

Windows 7 removed the photo gallery. Searching help on Windows 7 indicates that the album is gone and that you should fine one on your own. Of course, a free, and high quality solution for your system may be to use Windows Live Photo Gallery. You may want to choose which components you install from Windows Live since there are many that you may not want.

1. After installing the Windows Live Photo Gallery, run it.
2. Add your photo folder to the gallery by right clicking on the top of the tree at the left and choosing Add Folder to Gallery.
3. At this point, you can choose which photos you want to order and then choose the Create ribbon where you will find Print and Order Prints, which will activate the Wizard.
4. I noticed that newly created albums did not appear immediately when the wizard was re-run on Windows 7. You may want to create your albums on Coppermine before running the ordering wizard to avoid this delay.

I will be upgrading to Coppermine 1.5.x soon and will see if there are adjustments to be made to these instructions after I do that.

Cheers, and happy Coppermining.

- Windy

There are several devices on the market to allow backing up photos on a trip. Here is a partial list of devices. After reviewing the devices and checking prices, I found Digital Foci was selling a refurbished an 80GB unit for about $50 off. As you can see from the following pictures, the device is pretty hefty. It’s not a contender for an IPOD replacement, although it does almost all the functions of an IPOD. But it has CF and SD card slots built in and it has backup and compare [verify] functions built in. It backs up 233x CF cards at 4.88 MB/sec.

This device has all the functions of a modern multi-media kitchen sink. It also has a 12 hour battery life when playing MP3s. It remains to be seen how long it will last when backing up photos cards.

Features I liked

• The photo display and review features are very nice. The rotate and zoom features are well designed and even for large, 12MP, JPG images, the display time is very short. It takes 2 – 5 sec to display 16MB 12MP RAW images however. The photo album display features are best utilized if you reduce the images to 1.5MP or so [1280x1024 for example].
• Photo card backup is great. Inserting a card brings a popup to the screen asking how you would like to do the backup. Beware of the glitch though where the card is found but the hard drive is not found. Make sure you see the hard drive in the menu before inserting the card in the device. The work around is simple once you know the secret.
• The computer connection works quite well. The transfer is also very fast. I did have some intermittent connection problems with the USB cable, but seating the cable more firmly in the device fixed that.
• I have been using this device for hours and hours to listen to podcasts. The Photo Elite has a little speaker, which isn’t much good for music but is just fine for podcasts. No constraining earbuds to wear and you can carry it around with you while you work around the house. The only problem is that it doesn’t remember your place in the podcast when you shut the system down. But you can pause it for many minutes without noticeable drain on the battery.

What the device is not.

• This device is not a replacement for my Sansa MP3 player. The Sansa has longer battery life and is shirt pocket size. This device is large and cumbersome for an MP3 player.
• It’s not a game console, although it has a game built in called MATRIX which is suspiciously like Tetris. But the screen is larger than a PSP and there are card slots, so while your PSP or DS may have most of this device’s media features, the game consoles don’t provide the convenient photo backup feature and I’m not sure that any of them have 80 or 160GB of on-board storage.
• The Photo Elite has no WiFi capability. But you won’t miss that drain on your battery.

I’ll bet this device:

1. has a laptop drive hiding inside.
2. is based on some form of embedded Linux – good for them.
3. contains software written by software engineers living in California. The interface is well designed and performance is snappy.
4. will have future follow-on devices with more storage and more functions. These guys are on a roll.

Good luck to Digital Foci. This device gets my vote for coolest thing to solve my photo card backup problem at a very reasonable price. And listening to dozens of hours of podcasts is a real bonus. You go, Leo…

- windy

These are high quality bound books with full page size pictures. You choose which pictures from my site are in your book.
[Click for larger view of these images]


Photos are full size on the 12″x16″ pages. Color rendition is excellent and the paper is heavy and slightly mat finish for better viewing.

The books have high quality sewn bindings.

The covers are textured durable material and may have up to a 30 characters embossed title of your choice.

You may choose any of these colors for your cover. Dark Blue is shown.

To order your custom photo book:

1. visit my photo gallery and choose which pictures you would like in your book. Choose a minimum of 20 pictures and no more than 99 pictures [ I reserve one page for a copyright and information page].
2. If you are interested in the artistic model photography on the site, you must register on the site under the @ menu at the top of the page to state you are 18 years of age or older. You may select from any of the photos that you then have access to.
3. Write down the actual image name of each photo. These almost always start with DSC_ and a number. The high resolution pictures – 6.1 MP – will be used to make your book.
4. In the case of DSC_xxx_Pano, the high resolution panorama image will be used to make the book. This panorama image may be as high as 5900 pixels across and provides an extremely detailed picture in the large book.
5. Contact me via email with the list of images that you have chosen, and your complete name and address.
6. I will contact you via email with the price and shipping for your book and instructions about how to pay for your book using PayPal.
7. When I have received payment, I will begin production of your book which will be shipped directly to you. Your book should arrive to any place in the US in about a week. Overseas shipments take longer of course.

Please note.
Regarding the artistic model photography on my site: All the models are 18 years or older at the time of the photography and I have full releases from all of them.
Also note, that your purchase of a book does not entitle you to any additional rights for the pictures you have purchased. You may not duplicate the pictures or the book for any reason. If you are interested in purchasing rights to distribute the pictures from my site, contact me and we can discuss that. I can provide licenses for almost all the photos on my site for you to use them any way that you like. Including copies of the releases for the models, of course.

• Need high quality photos of you for your website?
• Need a website that is easy to maintain and update, without hiring someone to make every change and without needing to learn complicated web stuff?
• Need a website that you can control and update yourself?

We can set you up with:

• A reliable hosting service and domain for about $60 / year for all the space that you will ever need.
• An easy to use website that you can update with your browser to add photos or change content.
• A website with your own special look, or move your current site and keep the current look while adding lots of features.
• Update your schedules, and photos. Write weekly blog entries to keep your site alive and enticing. Make any other changes you like, from anywhere, using only a browser.
• All for a small one-time service fee.

Modest Rates:

Website work is $40/ hr. We help you with hosting and domain services – from a major hosting service, or a hosting service of your choice. A typical site setup costs about $400. This includes a minimum of 10 hours of work described in more detail below. Custom work is billed by the hour.

Photo shoots are $200 per shoot if we retain some rights to photos. $300 if you retain exclusive rights. You get all photos in high quality [6.1MP, 3000x2000] as well as reduced size for posting [typically 800x550, or size of your choice]. Prints as large as 11″x14″ are sharp from these size images. Any photoshop work and prints are additional. Our long experience and high quality studio equipment guarantee quality photos. You will get hundreds of images from the shoot which usually lasts 4 hours. There is no strict time limit and no “upselling”. You can see many of the photos we have done for models here.

Photoshop work on photos is billed at $40/ hr. We are skilled at bluring faces for anonymity, skin smoothing, blemish removal and other effects.

Building Your Site

You will typically want to have a broadband internet link [DSL or Cable], but site maintainence is quite possible using dial-up. The site will be setup from our office using broadband.

First you need a hosting service and domain. If you already have a site, we can almost always setup your new site on your current hosting service. Your current site will not be disrupted until you are happy with the new site.

If you do not have a site, we help you get started with a hosting service, choose a domain and activate the site. You will typically need a credit card to purchase the domain and site in your name. If this is a problem, we will work with you to find a solution. A hosting service is about $50 / year and domains are about $9/year or less.

WordPress is a very popular and very easy to use blogging tool. It can easily be adapted to build websites that have an interesting and engaging look and feel. WordPress was developed by authors and graphic artists and is largely free of geek-speak. WordPress is free, so there is nothing to buy beyond the hosting service, domain and our services to set it up.

Developing a typical site includes setting up WordPress on your host site, selecting an existing theme and simple customizing including a banner image. Included is two hours of training on using wordpress to maintain your site to write articles. Custom work, paid by the hour beyond the initial fee, includes any programming for a new theme look and operation, custom images and more involved training on the use of WordPress.

We look forward to working with you to give your erotic business that special and enticing look to draw your clients into your fantasy.

Email us or call us at (541) 888 4262 to discuss your requirements.

Darrell

Haylo’s Gallery

The whole shoot is here, but you will have to login to see it.

Haylo now has an OMP page.

You can see all the great pictures here.

Rack Card Front

Rack Card Back

Does the ad copy sound like it will draw our clients into our fantasy?

darrell

[Removed for privacy reasons]

Hot July 1st Shoot

You can reach Haylo here: Haylo on Model Place

Shoots with Ronnie

You can reach Ronnie here: Ronnie at Model Mayhem

Shoots with Haylo

Another Oregon Coast beauty. Don’t forget to register on the site for more pictures.

Panoramas

The skunk cabbage is in full leaf, although by now the flowers are all gone. Don’t forget to click on the pictures for a full size image. The images are about 6000 pixels wide in full size. If rendered at highest quality, some of these pictures would be over 20,000 pixels wide.

More information on the SSNERR and the entire NERR system can be found here: SSNERR home page

enjoy.

Coastal Sites

Panoramas of the House

Don’t forget to look for any albums you may have missed. 30knots slope soaring, etc.

enjoy,
djd

Requirements
My requirements are:

• Be suitable for a single person gallery. I’m not looking to build a photo portal, just my own galleries / albums.
• Handle EXIF photo data.
• Be easy to set up.
• Be attractive, with the ability to change themes, or select themes. And to customize my own theme.
• Be free, and open source.

Candidates
I found the following candidates. I’m sure this is not an exhaustive list. But I trust google to find the most popular candidates in the first couple of pages of a search.

Gallery 2 – Very functional. Active development going on. Free, opensource. Popular, apparently. But, themes are way way too complicated. It’s impossible to figure out from looking at the code how to make a new theme or make changes to the ones they have. And you need to tweak them, because they don’t work. Of the themes that come with the distribution, several have problems with missing features. No comments, not exif data, etc. There is a theme customization methodology, but it’s not completely tied into the themes. So, it works, but it fails the test of customizability. And it’s performance stinks. It’s very easy to install tho. They did that right. And it supports XP Web Publish, which is a real time-saver.

Photo Post - Looks pretty good. But it costs $129 or so. Forget it. There are free alternatives.

Snipe Gallery – I saw an attractive gallery done with this one. But the site doesn’t answer with a database error, and google gets a failure when taking the link to source forge… Bad news… Something is wrong.

Exhibit Engine – This is a shareware, php based gallery. It is very geeky… Lots of attention to keepting track of which camera, lens and lighting was used. I attempted an install, and got totally bogged down in the manual updating of the parameters to get it going. I gave up when presented with a page of a dozen text parameters which were URLs pointing to my site and all had to be updated with my domain URL followed by some subfolder or another. Clearly the fellow can do better. All of that should have been automatic. WordPress and Gallery and Coppermine don’t have these issues. Give this one a pass.

Coppermine – Wow… Very professional looking. Easy to install. Very functional. Very very well documented, which is unusual for an opensource product. Gallery 2 has very little documentation. Coppermine comes with complete documentation on the site you install. So users get complete documentation too. It supports one or many users. Self registering or authorized or pre-registered. Themes are very well done. Rock solid and completely functional. Very attractive as well as functional. It has XP Web Publish support, but I did have to read the forums and tweak it to make it work.
I’m going to spend another day learning about the details of themes, but I don’t really think I need to tweak a theme before I can use this.

No going back…
At this point I’ve selected Coppermine.

I have been using an HTML gallery builder called ReaGallery from ReaSoft. It builds a very nice gallery and with a little work I was able to tweak a style that I liked. You’ve seen the galleries that I’ve posted here. I liked the style with the slider down the left side with the images on the right. Anyway, that’s been very nice and I could quickly build an album and then publish it to the web with FTP all at once. I liked that the software resized and built thumbnails.

But, the way the album looks cannot be changed later without rebuilding it. No themes. And there is no EXIF support, and no comments and you can’t add descriptions and titles later. The recent version of ReaGallery is actually less functional than the earlier release. Apparently they completely rewrote it and removed much of the customizeability.

But it’s time to move on to a web gallery solution. I will have to resize the images to 1024x, but I can use a batch conversion in IrfanView to do that.

I’m excited to be moving on…

At this point, my daughter and her friends are using Ringo, which is free. I’m not sure if there are limits or not. But of course its full of ADs in flash no less, and no themes and you don’t have control of your storage. I’m not sure if they are watching your traffic there or not… Naw of course they are not… And what about suggestive pics of models etc… Naw.. Doesn’t sound like where I want to be.

Shoot 1 - She joined Hollie and Shanda for a shoot in early November.

Brittnay and Shanda posed together for some shots on the first shoot.

Brittnay Shoot 2

Brittnay Shoot 3

I’m not going to go through all the research here. I found an informative list of tools and reviews in the forums over at DPReview and using google turned up a few other compendium pages that were helpful.

Here’s an interesting article.

PhotoByte is interesting but it didn’t solve the problem of off-line storage and seemed to be out of development.

Picasa is a photo management tool by Google. But Picasa is for a person with personal pictures, not a photo business.

I finally listed my photo management requirements as the following:

1. Manage a very large number of photos. I have 9000 slides that I’ve taken since 1977. But there are over 10,000 pictures from the D70 since summer 2004. This is a serious image management problem.
2. Manage off-line storage. Photos are backed up to DVD and each days photos are in folders named yyyy_mm_dd. There are sometimes 300 or more photos in a single day. Especially for a shoot with more than one model.
3. Thumbnails and other information available for off-line pictures.
4. Keyword assignment and searching. And a large tree of keywords built in that I can enhance as I go.
5. Ability to rotate the thumbnails for offline storage to see the picture.
6. Some editing capability for the images, although photoshop will be the editing platform of choice.
7. Ability to process and edit EXIF data.
8. Ability to handle a variety of formats, although JPEG is my format of choice. Certainly RAW may become important.
9. High performance.
10. Ease of backing up the database.
11. Under continuing development and with a good support system with forums and folks that are listening to their clients.
12. Have a long trial period so that I can kick the tires before I buy.
13. Cost less than $100.

IMatch satisfies all my requirements. It costs $60. And it has a 30 day trial period, after which it preserves all your database. It handles my off-line storage requriements easily. I have some 20 DVDs of photos and while it takes about 50 minutes to scan a DVD full of photos and put then into the database, once they are there, keywords and categories can be easily added; thumbnails can be righted and I can find what I need.

A super tool. I highly recommend it.

See discussions in the photography forum.