Regarding Forum/Coppermine integration.

[sgbotsford]

This may be a totally out of line request.  If it is, accept my apologies, but please point me toward a solution.

I want to create a photo site where images and forums are very intimately tied together.

Images belong to events.
Events belong to folders
Folders belong to categories.

Images, events, folders and categories each have an attached forum or thread.  By default there is a forum at the event level, and each image is a thread, with it's caption being the first message.

That's the 'real' hierarchy.

In addition I want a system for controlled vocabulary that encompasses people, time frame, event, location, subject class.
Using the controlled vocabulary, users can construct virtual albums.  By default every named person will have a virtual album.  But a user can make a virtual album 'my friends' that is the concatenation of the people albums of everyone he's declared friend.  Or "my trips" which is all the outdoor expeditions he's been on.

The goal of all this is that pictures remind people of stories.  Stories remind other poeple of stories.  Stories remind people of 'that geeky kid named Smith'  Now you have another name that can be applied in pictures.

The final requirement for this is that it has to scale well.  I'm anticipating 100,000 images, a million posts, 5000 people.

Can coppermine do this, or anything close to this without starting on a blank page?  Failing this, can people point me to a gallery that does do this?

[Αndré]

Moved from feature requests board.


I'm not quite sure where to start as I don't know if you're already familiar with Coppermine (or at least have read the docs) or if this is just a general question. You can add comments to images in Coppermine and there's also a keyword feature which could be used to create virtual albums. cpg1.5.x lacks of the possibility to add comments to albums, but this is scheduled for cpg1.6.x.

What you're asking doesn't exist that way in Coppermine. But it should be possible to use the already existing data to create a forum view (if you don't like the standard view).

[pols1337]

To help you out, this is my understanding of Coppermine:

Images belong to Albums (in Coppermine)
Albums belong to Categories (in Coppermine)

There are no such thing as folders in Coppermine. 


If you want, you can "bridge" Coppermine to another Forum / Bulletin Board software such as SMF (and which is the setup that I have -- it's very easy).  The major benefit is that a user can log-in to both the Forum and your Coppermine with one log-in.  There is no way, however, as far as I know to deeply embed or integrate Coppermine into SMF ... but I only use the basics of SMF, so if you are interested, you should check out the Add-Ons or Modifications to the Forum software. 

My suggestion is to start setting up a test Coppermine and to play around with it.  It's the only way to begin learning! 

[sgbotsford]

Ok.  No folders.  Categories and subcategories work.

While I will likely end up installing and playing, there are hundreds of web based image programs out there.  In playing around, I've found that it takes most of a day to give one a test.  So I'm trying to discover which comes close before running a real test.

So, for example, Gallery G3 failed -- while it has a contrib module for virtual albums, it turns out that if you expand a photo in a virtual album, then hit next, you get the next image in the real album that the link points to.

It also failed in that it has no support at present for controlled vocabulary.

So let me re-iterate what I'm looking for:

1.  Nested hierarchy of image folders.

2.  Support for virtual albums based on metadata contents.

3.  Sort real and virtual albums on the basis of metadata. (E.g. sort on Roll + frame number)

4.  Batch application of metadata. 

5.  Support for controlled vocabulary in a way that it is reasonably fast to tag images.  (Aperture does this well,  as does IMatch)

6.  Tight integration into a forum system, so that each level in the image hierarchy can have a comment thread and response.