In my continuing quest to find some decent gallery software to exhibit my photos, I’m on the move again.

Having upgraded to the latest version of Coppermine I discovered I can no longer upload photos. The supporters on the coppermine forums (swamped by issues with uploading which indicates a problem with their software) are unhelpful, arrogant and unfriendly these days in my opinion. Fair enough it’s all done on a voluntary basis and they are probably just frustrated by the kinds of requests for help and the way they have to repeat themselves, but they really should take a step back and look at what is fundamentally wrong with the software and their attitude which is leading to these frustrations.

So what next? I have looked at Gallery before but that seemed to lack features that Coppermine had hence I’d moved to Coppermine in the first place. Though I believe it’s moved on a bit now.

Recently I’ve been looking at Exhibit Engine. This is a package that tries to address everything missing from the likes of Coppermine and Gallery for the photographer, concentrating on specifics such as how a photo was taken, the shooting data, equipment and the work-flow used. It gives a more professional feel and the level of information you can provide per photo is more comprehensive. The comment and rating system has a more professional approach too, by asking the voter to rate on different technical and artistic factors. Also EE forces a comment to be left with a rating which helps avoids abusive, random or accidental voting.

Exhibit Engine is in beta at the moment (as of writing at version 1.5 RC4) and has some rough edges and complexity to set up. The guy behind it (who is a one man band) is friendly and helpful when asking questions. Customer service is always a plus in my book :D.

So I’ve set up EE and started loading some of my photos into it. The results of this can be seen here…

http://www.sirjohn.co.uk/ee

Something I am very impressed with is the ability to take the EXIF information and guess (fairly accurately) what equipment was used even when that information isn’t in the EXIF, in particular the lens information. Other systems require you to manually enter this information.

Edit: Due to hassles and constant updates required to Coppermine I’ve given up with it so the example photo below won’t show up any more. However the article should still be valid although I am not updating it for any future changes to Coppermine.

I’ve been finding it a struggle to get photos embedded in a page with a set layout such as a WordPress blog. One option is to change the layout but another is to instead have the photos appear on top of the page instead thus releasing them from the constraints of the layout.

Such a solution is available in the form of Lightbox JS. I then discovered this script has been wrapped up in a WordPress plugin, Lightbox JS WordPress Plugin. Further to this there is a modification of this script to allow the photos to be scaled to the browser display with an option to view at full size, as in the Lightbox Plus WordPress Plugin.

I have in the meantime been linking in my images from my Coppermine Gallery using the Coppermine Plugin, but this just links to Coppermine when clicking on thumbnails, so I’ve made a couple of modifications to make the plugin optionally use Lightbox.

As an example, here’s a photo to try out…

[cpg_imagefixthumb:1472]

Click on the image for a larger photo.

Modifications to the Coppermine Plugin (this is a diff view between the original and my changes)

Click here to download the modified plugin (you will need to edit the file and configure the database settings).

Essentially I’ve added an additional mode called ‘lightbox’ to CPGSC_SINGLEIMAGE_LINK and modified where this is used. I’m not sure if this will work for album views, probably not.
Note that I’ve also made another modification to the plugin to display a copyright message beneath photos when viewed in ‘normal’ mode, but this is optional and not currently being used in lightbox mode.