Enterprise Coppermine Solution

[mattwalters]

Hello!!

I am trying to determine if Coppermine is a good solution for me.  I have installed Coppermine 1.3.2, Apache 2.x, mySQL 4.x, and PHP4 on a Windows XP machine.  All is working thus far but I have the following issue.  I have over 150,000 photos in one folder (i:\prod) on a NAS device.  The photos have to remain with that path to work with the ERP package our company uses.  This application is going to be used on a intranet so I have two questions: 

1.  Can the there be one album folder, such as my i:\prod folder (not on the web server) - Because it looks as if the album folder that the config uses is a relative reference (../albums/) and cannot use an absolute reference such as (i:/prod/)

2.  If number 1 is possible, does the image have to reside in an "album" that is belongs to?  Again, I can only have my images under one folder on my NAS device.

Here is an example:  I have a category called "Supply Lines"  Under that, I have albums of "Icemaker Supply Lines", "Steel Braided Supply Lines", etc.  I would like it if the mySQL database stored the Category, and album information in the record for each picture and would dynamically create the thumbnails based on the criteria the user selects, without the image residing within an album subfolder on the web server.  Does Coppermine have this functionality and I am missing it?  If it does not, can someone recommend an open source, database driven package that does this?  The only other option I have thought of is embedding the keywords into the EXIF data of the images themselves but that is not very efficient. However, it would allow the built-in search capability within Windows to find the photos that match the criteria and display as thumbnails.

Thank you!!

[Joachim Müller]

The pics can stay on the NAS device, with a shortcut existing inside coppermine's albums folder that points to the NAS path (i:\prod). The drawback of coppermine in your case is: it will create the intermediate files and thumbnails in the very folder the pics reside in, so it needs write access to i:\prod and will create the thumbnails there. Without a lot of hacking, there's no workaround for this. If you can live with this sort of drawback, question number two is easily solved: files don't have to reside in subfolders that represent albums: coppermine doesn't move files around, and the file structure within the folders is being kept no matter what category/album you put the pics - coppermine keeps a record of the file's location inside the database entry, there doesn't have to be a match to the folder structure (although this is recommended so the human can keep track of pics). If you decide to keep the pics on the NAS you will have to make sure that non-coppermine-admins won't delete, rename or move the files coppermine is refering to in it's database (nobody else should have write access to i:\prod but you as admin and the webserver coppermine runs on).
Most web photo galleries haven't been built with company's LAN structures in mind, I don't know of a web gallery solution that handles this in any other way (although there might be solutions that don't work webserver based, but use some other methods typically used on LANs).
Hope that helps.

Joachim

[mattwalters]

Joachim,

Thank you so much for the detailed reply.  I have just now had the time to devote to this and have everything working except one thing.  It seems as if the shortcut I have placed in the albums folder is not seen as a folder by Coppermine.  I can double-click on the "prod" shortcut from within Windows Explorer and it takes me to i:\prod - However, when I goto Batch-Add, it is not seen as a folder.  To troubleshoot, I created a folder called "test" under albums and was able to successfully Batch Add a test image within the folder.  I copied the test image to my i:\prod folder and edited path to the file within the mySQL database.  Coppermine still does not see it as a true folder.  I don't know if this is a PHP or Apache issue.  Any ideas?

Thank you,

Matt

[Joachim Müller]

OK, I can see that this is a problem on Windoze, as a Lunix symlink is not the same a Windoze shortcut is. I guess the searchnew.php routine sees the shortcut just as a file (just foobar.lnk), not a folder it is supposed to look into. I'm not sure how to solve this issue though, sorry.

Joachim

[mattwalters]

Joachim,

You are right.  I found out that a shortcut in Windows to a folder is seen by PHP as a file and not a folder.  However, I found a freeware program called Winbolic that creates a UNIX style symlink.  This program can be found at: http://www.pearlmagik.com/winbolic/

Thank you for your help.  Everything is working great!

Matt