Photo manager

This project is a photo management application built on top of MarkLogic Server 5. (It uses external binaries, so porting to 4.x isn't practical.) You can see it in operation at photos.nwalsh.com.

Amazon S3

Note: To resolve some bandwidth issues, I've recently implemented a branch, "s3", that stores the images in Amazon S3 and the metadata in XML.

Installation

1. Install MarkLogic Server 5 if you haven't already.
2. Download the project and put it with your other MarkLogic projects. I put it in /MarkLogic/photoman. If you put it elsewhere, make sure you update the paths accordingly.
3. I'm using the Fico font for the "icons" in lists. You'll have to edit things a bit if you don't want to buy a license for Fico.
4. Make sure you've got ExifTool and the Perl Image::ExifTool libraries.
5. Make sure you've got ImageMagick

Setup

1. Login to the server as admin and run QConsole.
2. Open setup/initialize.xqy and paste it into a QConsole panel. Look at the variables at the top and assure yourself that you're comfortable with them. The initialize script:
   1. Creates a database named $DATABASE-NAME (photoman) with a single forest named $FOREST-NAME (photoman).
   2. Creates an appserver named $APPSERVER-NAME (photoman) on port $APPSERVER-PORT (7070). This will be the server for ordinary users.
   3. Creates an appserver named $ADMIN-APPSERVER-NAME (photoman-admin) on port $ADMIN-APPSERVER-PORT (7071). This will be the server for administration. Do not allow public access to this server
   4. Creates $WEBLOG-READER (weblog-reader) and $WEBLOG-UPDATE (weblog-update) privileges
   5. Creates $WEBLOG-READER and $WEBLOG-EDITOR (weblog-editor) roles.
   6. Creates a $WEBLOG-READER (weblog-reader) user.
3. Copy setup/amped.xqy to nwalsh/photoman/amped.xqy in the Modules directory of the server (often /opt/MarkLogic/Modules).
4. In the MarkLogic Server Admin UI, port 8001, in the Security section, create an "amp" named "update-views" with the namespace "http://nwalsh.com/ns/modules/photoman/amped" and the URI "/nwalsh/photoman/amped.xqy". Give it the $WEBLOG-EDITOR role.
5. Open /MLS/admin/setup.xqy and change the top-level variables as necessary. Run /admin/setup.xqy on your admin server (e.g., http://localhost:7071/admin/setup.xqy).

Adding images

The process for adding images is a little clumsy. I elected to use ExifTool for extracting metadata because it does a good job and produces robust metadata. I decided to scale the images and store them as external binaries because that seemed a good tradeoff of speed vs. space. It's possible to get the server to do the ImageMagick piece, but it means processing horsepower over and over again.

1. Create the photos directory and decide how you're going to organize the images physically. I do it by date, so I create directories like /MarkLogic/photoman/photos/2012/04/17 and put the images in there.
2. Copy an image (or images) into the photo directory or directories.
3. Run bin/imgsize on those directories. That'll create all the scaled images.
4. Run bin/upload-photo on those directories. Check the defaults in there first.
5. That should upload the first images. Now you should see the fruits of your efforts on port 7070 and 7071.

WTF!?

Problem? Drop me a note or create an issue. I'll do what I can, when I can.

Bounty

My offer still stands.