Import albums from Picasa 2 into Coppermine

[afaa]

I love Coppermine over Gallery2 but the latest thing from Gallery2.1 that can import from Piscasa is just too cool.
Reference link: http://codex.gallery2.org/index.php/Gallery2:Modules:picasa

If you mods don't think it's possible then please ignore.

[Joachim Müller]

valid feature request, not sure it should go into the core or come as a plugin or mod though.

[Aditya Mooley]

Not really a valid feature request because there is no Picasa SDK available.
What the Gallery2 mod does is just accept a Zip file containing pictures. Now, accepting Zip file is a valid feature request.

[weegee]

Picasa can export with an xml-file including the captions.. maybe it would be easy to read that file, so we don't have to write every caption again...

[Tranz]

The api is available now: http://code.google.com/apis/picasa/

It would be so awesome to have this available. I started using Picasa to organize my photos and it makes it so easy to upload to Facebook with the api.

If no one wants to do this, I could try to do it. But there are stronger coders than me on the team.

Since in facebook this is an application, this could probably be a plugin and doesn't need to go into the core code of Coppermine.

My friend said he'd help me out on the project if no one else on the team wants to do this.

[Tranz]

My friend and I have already started doing research on this--checking out the iPhoto plugin--so I'll volunteer to take this on unless there are any objections. We've been wanting to work on a project and this seems like a good one.

[Joachim Müller]

I'm looking forward to your plugin. I'm sure that you will do fine - don't under-estimate your skills. I think you did a fantastic job with your previous contributions.

Joachim

[Tranz]

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Joachim.

As I did some more research, I came across the announcement of the picasa api. Guess what I saw in the comment section:

tariquesani.net said...
WOW! thanks finally I can sit and program my sent to Coppermine button!

I'll ping Tarique to see about his work on the Coppermine button.

[Tarique Sani]

Hi Thu, Thanks for taking this up. Now that Picasa has given a API / Inteface to work with this indeed become a valid feature request and a good one at that. I did investigate and managed to get some "proof of concept" code but we never really finished it. However, as I remember there are a few challenges which need to be addressed

Most of the buttons available are for large sites like blogger, iphoto, flickr etc which means it is create once and forget it job but

#1 We cannot have a ready made button available for download because the URL to upload the photo has to be absolute and hard coded into button.

#2 Which album will this button upload to?

For #1 my idea was to have the button created dynamically - after all it is just a zip file - our URL to the picasa button will write the absolute path + url of the script to upload this to into the proper file, create the zip with an appropriate name and serve it

For #2 I am open to suggestions.

@Thu - I am willing to collaborate and extend whatever help you might need to see this thru

[Tranz]

1) your idea to address the dynamic info challenge sounds good to me
2) Would it not be possible to get a list of albums to upload to and have the option to create new albums? I'm just thinking that that's how the Facebook plugin does it.

I'm looking forward to having a working plugin. Thanks for offering to help.

[Tranz]

I have good news and bad news.

Good news: I have functioning code to upload files from Picasa 3 to a Coppermine gallery.

Bad news: It only works for CPG 1.5. It doesn't work in version 1.4; I think it has to do with the sanitizing of $_POST variables.

Limitations: this currently does a batch upload of the files, with proper resizing done on the computer (saving strain on the server). Because of that, file data like Captions, Keywords, etc are not transferable to the Coppermine gallery. Maybe eventually a more advanced upload method could be used so that the additional data could be retained.

To do's:
- Turn this into a plugin
- Automate the button-creation process.
  - Do this during plug-in installation.

Since this doesn't modify any core files, I'm not sure if it's necessary to make this a plugin.

[Joachim Müller]

That's good news - it doesn't hurt imo that this will only work for cpg1.5.x. Actually, it should give end users an additional benefit for updating from cpg1.4.x to cpg1.5.x once it get's released. I'm looking forward to the plugin.

[Letus]

let me share some thoughts about this : i find Picasa one of the best tools to organize pictures on local machine, by having all the features of taging, naming, rating pictures, creating virtual albums etc etc. It simply works. My 10 years of active photography gives me archive of 40.000+ images (i know, dont ask ), and this is the only tool i belive it allows me to give them some rules Picasa is quick and easy, and lets be honest - its free after all.

coppermine is great tool and im using it for few years now, hosting over 35 thousand images in it, mine and others as well. It has some drawbacks, but i never thought of moving to some other tool.

i know there are links to various FTP upload solutions, XP publishing etc, but this doesnt go the way I need - I need to be able to select images in Picasa, "hit a button", choose a target gallery on my webserver and go make a cup of tea, while my machine is busy uploading. This can be done via FTP, mass upload etc, i know, but it doesnt have the ONLY option i really need - I need to transfer the CAPTIONS of the images, and make coppermine to accept them when processing the images into a given album / folder. This is really the one and only reason i want to have Picasa and Coppermine work together - if i organize pictures on my local machine, i give them names, descriptions etc, i dont want to do that job again on my remote / web server.

As i checked the google code page for Picasa2Coppermine project, the site is empty, there is nothing Is there any progress on this tool ? what are the problems with 1.4 version, can it be modified (even hardcoded) so it accepts the picasa files ? Is there a progress with this idea ? As i mentioned, this is quite interesting option for me, so I apologize for being so eager to see the results, but I belive this is the true future of photography publishing on the web And if I can offer my php coding skills, I gladly will, to help this project to complete.

[Tranz]

Thanks for the offer to help, Letus. I definitely would like to have some help to get the title, caption, etc data transferred from Picasa to Coppermine, also.

The project is empty because I couldn't figure out how to upload the source after going through all the menu options. I should have looked for instructions at the time but didn't get around to it.

The reason, I believe, that this plugin doesn't work with 1.4 is because of how that version handles input, like that from $_POST. It sanitizes all data and removes html entities that Picasa sends to Coppermine. I think getting around this would open the gallery to security vulnerabilities so that's why I didn't pursue that. In CPG 1.5, there's a new framework(?) for handling input which has an option to allow raw data input. Since this export feature is only available to gallery admins, I believed it would be reasonably secure from exploits by would-be hackers.

[Tranz]

I figured out how to upload the picasa2coppermine source to Google Code. I'm currently working on the wiki instructions on how to use picasa2coppermine. It will be more automated, hopefully, but it's a manual process now.

Please note that this also requires getting CPG 1.5 from svn. (unless you're reading this after 1.5 gets released officially and then svn isn't required)

[Letus]

perfect, i wanted to see the code you made to be able to help, and extend the amount of information that curently get loaded from Picasa to CPG So i will check your code and see what we can do, also about the _post sanitizing and stuff.

[Letus]

well, from what i've read about it, Picasa is storing the information in IPTC part of the image descriptions. To achieve what I need to do - upload images and keep their descriptions and names without duplicite work, it seems to be possible to "append" IPTC post-processing of the uploaded images >


1) image is choosen on local folder (marked within Picasa)
2) image is uploaded to remote webserver with Coppermine (using this plugin)
3) image is resized, watermarked etc on remote webserver
4) image is saved to database on remote webserver

and now

5) image is opened to read IPTC information from it, these information are updated to database to update image NAME (not file name, just the TITLE or CAPTION of the image) and DESCRIPTION

this would do the "magic" i need to do

do you agree or have any other ideas how to transfer the descriptions and titles ?

[Letus]

the other thing might be, to create "offline" module to be launched on finished gallery - this module would go thru all images in the given gallery, read their IPTC info, update caption and description of the image (database fields), and move to next image ...

[Tranz]

well, from what i've read about it, Picasa is storing the information in IPTC part of the image descriptions. To achieve what I need to do - upload images and keep their descriptions and names without duplicite work, it seems to be possible to "append" IPTC post-processing of the uploaded images >


1) image is choosen on local folder (marked within Picasa)
2) image is uploaded to remote webserver with Coppermine (using this plugin)
3) image is resized, watermarked etc on remote webserver
4) image is saved to database on remote webserver

and now

5) image is opened to read IPTC information from it, these information are updated to database to update image NAME (not file name, just the TITLE or CAPTION of the image) and DESCRIPTION

this would do the "magic" i need to do

do you agree or have any other ideas how to transfer the descriptions and titles ?

@Letus: Thanks so much for researching this. Since the data is stored with the file in IPTC, it seems we don't need to do massive changes to this plugin to support getting the titles/descriptions transferred into Coppermine. Instead, as you implied in your more recent post, I think that that process should be handled in a separate plugin so that people using tools other than Picasa can take advantage of the data transfer. I did a search for IPTC in the forums here and there were a lot of results. Maybe someone has accomplished the task already.

Just a little correction on the order of things:
1) image is choosen on local folder (marked within Picasa)
2) image is resized, watermarked etc by Picasa
3) image is uploaded to remote webserver with Coppermine (using this plugin)
4) image is saved to database on remote webserver

One of the benefits of this plugin is not having to use webserver resources to do resource intensive file manipulations.

As I mentioned above, #5 should be handled by a non-Picasa-specific plugin. Then again, if it's easy enough, we can include it in the plugin so that people won't need to have 2 plugins to accomplish the tasks they want. I would just prefer to enable a solution that is less specific so that more people can benefit.

@ALL. A security flaw has been uncovered in the plugin so please let me make it clear: Do not use this on a publicly available web server. The subversion access was required to make it harder for less experienced users to try this out. This is currently for developers to test and revise. Since this requires CPG 1.5, which is not recommended for live use yet, please don't use this except for testing on a private/local server until there is a downloadable version. Thank you.

[Letus]

thank you for the debate, it helps to clear things out , very progressive

from my point of view, the watermarking is mainly protective and also "branding" tool, and because of the "branding" side of this, i prefer to do it always the same way, it means, for any user who uploads photos to our gallery (there is about 100 of them currently), the watermark will be there, with same size and same position on all the pictures. So i suggested the order of uploading and resizing pictures on the remote machine (also, due to our main focus, which is military / history, we tend to upload large pictures to keep the details as big as possible, so reducing size locally means we are loosing information), this is definitly something we can set up two different ways (maybe some kind of setting in your tool ?), because not everybody needs to do it "my way".

but back to the point of IPTC, i did some research here yesterday, and there is tool that reads all images in the folder / gallery and if it finds IPTC info in them, it replaces / updates current image title and description with the information found in IPTC. Which is exactly what i was looking for, now we have two options. We can either adjust this mod and use part of it to attach it to this mod as post-processing ( point #5 in previous discussion) or keep it standalone like it is now, and only suggest ppl to install that mod as well and run after images are uploaded from Picasa using your plugin.

So i feel this is getting very close to what i am looking for

PS. As "real life situation", there is one more thing for me to think about - as I mentioned, i have thousands of images in my gallery. I invested a LOT of time to upload them, rename some of them, describe them. Now, I have Picasa on my local machine, where original images are, and these resized, adjusted, and described images with titles on my webserver. We obviously figured out, how to upload from Picasa(local) to Coppermine(remote). Now I just need to find a method, how to do it "the other way around", so how to get at least SOME of the information from Coppermine(remote) to my images in Picasa(local), so I dont have to do the same work of describing the local images, when I did that on remote (but its not in IPTC, but only in the database). And this task will be tough I'd say