README

Album - a simple and sturdy HTML5/Js photo web album

This code is (C) 2010-2012 - Auke Kok <auke@foo-projects.org>

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Why yet another web photo album?

There are many excellent photo albums on the web. Some are trivial,
some are complex.  None of them worked for me. Complex is great, it
means many features, but also fragility and complexity in setting up,
including many obscure requirements.

After yet another gallery database crash wiping out my 10k large
private collection database, I realized that DB's are evil for
something that should be simple.

So, I set out to make a trivial, fast and simple photo album leveraging
the browser and a mostly vanilla apache+php setup, without database.

Design considerations:

- no DB
- on demand thumbnail generation
- server side caching of thumbnails
- no page reloading ever
- html5 video support
- image preloading to improve album browsing speed
- keyboard navigation enabled
- slideshow support


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How to install?

 Prerequisites:
  - A httpd server. Any should do.
  - PHP 5. Any PHP server version should do, but compat issues are not
    looked at. The following features should be on in the PHP build:
     - GD
     - EXIF
  - A webserver writable cache folder with plenty of space
  - Inotify-tools (To detect video uploads and start recoding)
  - ffmpeg (to recode to MP4)
  - ffmpeg2theora (to recode to OGV)
  - ImageMagick (To generate video thumbnails)

Git clone the project and point your browser to the project root folder. Edit
config.php and enter users. Make sure you change the cache folder location if
needed.