a few "basic" questions

[flux]

hi,

i've installed coppermine 1.3 on my dedicated linux debian testing apache 2 server..
everything works fine and i'm now in the process of modifying cpg more to my (admin) requirements..

so i 've read most of the documentation and faqs out there and there's one thing i couldn't find much info about :

i was wondering if there was a way to make cpg handle the filesystem itself.. As far as i understand cpg does not handle physical files itself besides creating intermediate and thumb pics.. What i'd like cpg to do is to create directories, possibly in the album directory, matching the categories / albums created in the admin and then physicaly move the pics in the appropriate folders when you move them in the gallery..
is there a way to do that or was cpg designed not tohandle anything on the filesystem ?

My second question concerns the admin mode.. I would like to be able to sort ("batch" move them) the pictures directly in the thumbnails gallery. As far as i've seen you can only move a picture to another album by editing it, the edit button being available only on the "intermediate" display..
Are there any admin addons out there that simplify batch picture moves while browsing the galleries ?

If not i'm going to make that myself it shouldn't be too hard even though i'm no php guru, but if i was to do such a hack how should i make it, directly into the code or are there some kind of plugin system ? I've seen some code addons on sf but i couldn't figure how to install them and so i haven't tried to see how they were built..

for the rest i've found a quite usefull standalone script to batch upload pictures from the hd with auto cat/albums creation and i've adapted it to be more flexible and use existing categories, based on the directory name, as the target for uploaded pictures..

Thx for any input you can give me about my two questions above
cpg rulez thx for your work everyone

[donnoman]

There's no mod that I know of that does what your asking. It's been discussed several times, but as a core feature it has been turned down.

I have been thinking about writing some kind of maintenance script that would go through the db and move the images on the filesystem and update the db according to cat structure. But if I do this it will be for 1.4 and I have no timeline.

A couple of tools that I am using:

Rudimentary Script to move images if you move the folder or rename it with the filesystem.
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=15710.0

Continuous Batch Add with automatic category and album creation for an arbitrary number of images.
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=13949.0

Coppermines db and filesystem work fine for doing what it was created for; display images to web users.

But Coppermine is SO good at it, it would be nice if we could use it as a front end for creating image repositories that have other uses. Thats how I use it at work. But to keep everything organized I have to turn off some of the features that make Coppermine such a great option. Like user upload. I have people send the items directly to me then I batch add them so they end up where I need them.

Why? because the images and documents are used for other purposes and accessed both witihin coppermine and directly over the network with a share. We do projects where documents and images are stored, when the project is done, we export them to cd or dvd, and delete the cat's and albums that had to do with that project. Rinse/Repeat.

BUT that being said, making the filesystem match the category/album structure introduces some security tradeoffs, as it's now easy to predict and use the images without using Coppermine via the web; which is something that many admins of web albums are trying NOT to do.  It's really more of a PR issue, because if someone wants to grab all the images off your albums the only way to protect them is with restricting the albums to logged in users and using Coppermines permissions to restrict who can see what thumbs.  If somebody can see your thumbnail images, they can grab the fullsize. There's just no way around it.

[flux]

thx for the answers

There's no mod that I know of that does what your asking. It's been discussed several times, but as a core feature it has been turned down.

I have been thinking about writing some kind of maintenance script that would go through the db and move the images on the filesystem and update the db according to cat structure. But if I do this it will be for 1.4 and I have no timeline.

yeah that's what i figured out looking at the code.. and after testing the beast i understood cpg was not going to sort my pics for me

i was just surprised and a bit frustrated at the same time coz all the CMS projects i've worked on, involving pictures management, were designed to sort/store the pictures where the admin wanted them to be so i guess i didn't think of a system acting different..
but as i said it's two different designs and modifications would probably be quite extensives..

Continuous Batch Add with automatic category and album creation for an arbitrary number of images.
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=13949.0

yeah that's the one i found and modified to match my requirements..
thx for the second script, i'll take a look at it.

Coppermines db and filesystem work fine for doing what it was created for; display images to web users.

But Coppermine is SO good at it, it would be nice if we could use it as a front end for creating image repositories that have other uses. Thats how I use it at work. But to keep everything organized I have to turn off some of the features that make Coppermine such a great option. Like user upload. I have people send the items directly to me then I batch add them so they end up where I need them.

Why? because the images and documents are used for other purposes and accessed both witihin coppermine and directly over the network with a share. We do projects where documents and images are stored, when the project is done, we export them to cd or dvd, and delete the cat's and albums that had to do with that project. Rinse/Repeat.

well i guess we have the same idea of what improvements CPG would get if some filesystem management was added

BUT that being said, making the filesystem match the category/album structure introduces some security tradeoffs, as it's now easy to predict and use the images without using Coppermine via the web; which is something that many admins of web albums are trying NOT to do.  It's really more of a PR issue, because if someone wants to grab all the images off your albums the only way to protect them is with restricting the albums to logged in users and using Coppermines permissions to restrict who can see what thumbs.  If somebody can see your thumbnail images, they can grab the fullsize. There's just no way around it.

well i wouldn't be so sure about that.. in fact the CMS systems i work on let the admins upload pictures and keep the original filenames then adds a random unique string to make sure the filename does not exists.. that make dupes management a little easier in the core code..
Then thumbs are generated the same way CPG does it, but the thumbs are named only using a unique string. So even though the thumbs are located in a directory tree matching the urls, the full size pics cannot be grabbed if you don't have the exact url to them..
So if you restrict users access to thumbs on the web there's no way they can find the full size pics using the thumbs names & urls, of course the fullsize pics are not protected but their full url can't be guessed using thumbs..

Anyways my idea wasn't to protect/hide anything, and as long as you make some pics public on the web you have to assume they'll be grabbed by someone someday, right ?
You can always use http tricks to limit/fight leechers..

Thx for your answers i've really appreciated it..
In the meantime i've also installed the cvs version just to check it out
looks nice, i havent explored the advanced functions and uses of that gallery system but i was pretty impressed by its ease of use out of the box !

I'll probably let that filesystem thing aside for the moment and concentrate of my quick mod to get some easier ways to batch sort pics in admin mode within the thumbs galleries, so far that's the only thing i reallly need to have to make a good use of CPG.. Hopefull i can produce a patch or hack or whatever it's called out of it..
Later,

.Flux