Eskimo North

I am a rank amateur but I do have an EN web site that I use to present information and photos to an organization and others. I would also like to be able to show photos from events in a slide show pattern. I don't need sound or any effects - just the ability to go from photo to photo in timed or manual scroll.

So... can I have some of the advertised help?

Thanks

Chuck Bollinger
chuckb

A slide show is easy, it's built-in to Coppermine. Here is an example:

http://www.eskimo.com/~nanook/gallery/displayimage.php?album=64&pid=971&slideshow=5000

First a bit of background. Coppermine is database driven, it can use a variety of databases, but of those we have available here, MySQL is the better choice, so ask support@eskimo.com to setup a MySQL database for you (no charge for this). The database will be named the same as your login, in this case, 'chuckb' and your login to the database (Coppermine will need this) will also be the same. You will also need a password, so include your preferred password in your request to support.

Coppermine organizes your photographs into categories and albums. Categories can, in theory, be nested any number of levels deep; however the Coppermine themes do a poor job of presentation if they are nested so it's better to just stick with a flat list of categories and albums directly under the top-level categories.

To create a slideshow with specific list of images it is only necessary to create an album and upload those images to it. If you then go into that album and view the first image you want displayed, there will be a little 'S' in the upper left commands, click on that and you have a slideshow. The URL will then be in your browser window should you wish to create a link or embed it.

With respect to installation, after support has created your database, you'll need to grab the code from the Coppermine site at http://coppermine-gallery.net/. The actual download link is near the lower portion of the screen under the left column. Currently, as of th is writing, 1.4.13 is the most recent version.

Now, Coppermine puts the filename in the 'alt' tag of the displayed images, and if your file names are as creative as mine 0232.JPG, etc, (my camera names them thusly), that's not the best thing for search engines. I have some hacks that change that to use the Title instead however, my hacks don't do an adequate job of sanitizing the input (a PHP/MySQL guru I am not). (If you allow other people to upload photos there is the potential for disaster there).

You'll want to upload this to your directory, unpack it, and then move the directory to a subdirectory within your public_html where the subdirectory name is the main URL you want to be the front end of your Gallery, the index page. For example, if you use the directory "public_html/gallery", then http://www.eskimo.com/~chuckb/gallery would be the URL to your gallery.

The installation instructions for Coppermine are here: http://coppermine-gallery.net/demo/cpg14x/docs/index.htm#installation. However, they are not always the clearest and you can pretty much disregard the permissions section because it is mostly wrong for our hosting environment. Just set the umask as instructed below and pretty much everything will be correct.

First, before you unpack it set your umask to 022. That way all the permissions will be correct when it is unpacked, and the chmod they tell you to do in the install will not be necessary. Contrary to the install instructions you do NOT need or want to chmod any of your directories to 777, those instructions are tailored for a hosting environment where PHP scripts run with the web servers UID, here they run with your UID so giving directories and files public write permissions is not necessary.

It is a zip file, so when you unzip it you'll get a directory like cpg_1.4.13 for example. Let's say you did this in your main directory, then just:

Admittedly that was an abuse of the code BBCODE, but I wanted the BBS not to swallow white space there. So now once you've gotten that far it's time to point your web browser at the install script and start the configuration process.

http://www.eskimo.com/~chuckb/gallery/install.php

This would be the path assuming you put Coppermine under public_html/gallery.

The install script will collect information necessary to do the basic installation. First, it will need an admin login and password. This is what you will use to do pretty much everything on Coppermine, including uploading photos, and where your root gallery will exist, so I suggest making it your normal username not something like 'Admin'.

It will want your e-mail address. It uses this to notify you of various actions that you can elect to be notified on, when someone leaves comments, etc. Incidentally, I recommend against enabling comments. You'll get spammed with Viagra commercials, porn sites, internet gambling sites, etc.

Next will be the MySQL database setup.

It will need to know your database host, put 'localhost' (without the quotes), database name 'chuckb', database login 'chuckb', database password (whatever you ask support to set it up as), and database prefix. Now it will say the default is ok, and it will be something like 'cpg143_', but here I recommend changing this to just 'cpg_'. The reason for this is if you stay with the default, the version number is part of the prefix, now when an upgrade comes out, and you stay with the default, none of your table names in the database will match. So I recommend changing it to just 'cpg_' and it will avoid that problem.

Once it is done, it will take you to the index page. At that point you can login as admin, and go to Config, and change whatever you would like to change. One thing you will probably want to change early on is the default theme because it is pretty ugly. You can select from a number of included themes, personally, I'm using Eyeball with a few hacks, and others can be found around the net, or if you really get into it you can hack your own.

One word of warning, some themes hide the login by default; and if you change to one of these themes and logout or your login times out, you may think your stuck, but mousing over the HOME house symbol will reveal the login. Eyeball is one of the themes that does this.

After that create some categories and albums, upload a few photos, play with it a bit and get the feel of the command structure. Documentation is built-in but it's not always the most helpful. If you get stuck and need additional help, feel free to ask.

Thank you. That is a whole tutorial. I appreciate (and need) the detail. - Chuck

You're welcome. If you get stuck let us know. The documentation and configuration interface aren't the most intuitive (but still better than other packages I tried, most notably "Gallery" was horrid).