What is possible with Coppermine?

[krofty]

Hi there. I'm new to Coppermine en i'm thinking of using it to build a stock-images website (for people to buy images). That's why i have a few questions about the posibilities of Coppermine:

- How does Coppermine handle a large amount of images? (say 40.000 jpg's)
- Is it possible to add a pay-functionality when users want to buy an image?
- Is it possible to give users who payed permission to download a highres-image?
- Is it possible to recognise meta-information caputured in the JPGs? (the images have allready keywords in them)
- Is it possible to recognise wich system (mac or windows) the user is using and to show the images with the suitable colorprofile?

I hope someone has the answers.
Thanks!

Krofty

[Joachim Müller]

How does Coppermine handle a large amount of images? (say 40.000 jpg's)

Shouldn't be a problem if your server is capable of handling the page load (there are reports of sites with 90,000+ pics, see http://photo.enctu.org/ )

Is it possible to add a pay-functionality when users want to buy an image?

At the moment, there's no eCommerce functionality built-into coppermine (but is considered an option for future versions). You can add a paypal button to your template.

Is it possible to give users who payed permission to download a highres-image?

out-of-the-box: no. Would have to be hacked in.

Is it possible to recognise meta-information caputured in the JPGs? (the images have allready keywords in them)

There's EXIF and IPTC support, but only a small number of possible EXIF fields is shown.

Is it possible to recognise wich system (mac or windows) the user is using and to show the images with the suitable colorprofile?

Out-of-the-box: again no. It's rather easy to add a "check user-agent"-script to coppermine (to find out what OS the user's running), but I have no experience with color profiles - no idea how hard this would be...

GauGau

[krofty]

Thanks for your kind reply. To cut to the chase: i understand not every whish we have for our imagestock-site is possible. But maybe we can use Coppermine as a basis for our site and let an IT-guru write additional code. Do you think that's an option? Or is it better for us to start from scratch and not use Coppermine at all?

[Tarique Sani]

Do you think that's an option? Or is it better for us to start from scratch and not use Coppermine at all?

IMO Coppermine is 90% there for an Stock Image vending site. So it will be better for you to take that as a base and get it developed further.

Most importantly the exisiting functionality of CPG has been extensively tested and the code base is fairly mature and stable - This as an enterprise CTO would be a very big plus plus point for me

[malc]

- Is it possible to recognise wich system (mac or windows) the user is using and to show the images with the suitable colorprofile?

This gets complicated since it's not really a distribution issue, rather a image generation one.  The colour profile is associated with an image file, and conversion between various profiles should happen *before* the image files are uploaded to Coppermine.

Now, that said, I could concieve of a solution that involved having various prefixes for different profiles for the full-size pics in much the same way as we have prefixes for thumbs and standard size pics, and have each registered user able to specify their preferred search order (much safer than relying on the browser to provide clues).  This would then allow the user to see (say) Mac optimized versions if available, and the regular version if not.

Yet at the end of the day, I suspect that number of people who would be prepared to manage galleries that would serve pics in various color profiles is almost vanishingly small, so I doubt this would be of value to the significant majority of Coppermine users...