Virtual Photo Album / News: Recent posts

Please note that the address chris.studholme@canada.com no longer works for sending comments to the developer of this project (ie. me). Please use the address chris,studholme*utoronto,ca (, is .; * is @) to send me any comments, questions, etc. Thanks.

I've made some progress towards getting to version 2.0. Here are some important notes regarding the version 1.94 release:

* you must have PHP4 and Postgres7 to use it

* installation and photo creation instructions are included

* you still need to manually create the processed images (an automated image processing interface and image uploading will be written eventually)

* for a list of what's new with this "to-become v2.0" release, see the home page... read more

I had hoped to have some sort of version 2.0 release by now, but I've been too busy. This new code has been running my personal photo album (used by dozens of people) since February or so now and it's working very well.

What I would like to do is the following:

1. audit the code to remove security holes and add a few small features that were in the earlier versions

2. put up a demo somewhere (does sourceforge.net provide PostgreSQL database access?)... read more

I just wanted to let everyone know that development of the Virtual Photo Album has not ceased. In fact, a couple of months ago I started a more or less complete rewrite of the photo album software. The next release will probably be labled version 2.0. Here are some of the features I currently have working (at least to some extent):

* no more frames
* use of stylesheets
* better customization through web interface
* integrated admin and user interfaces
* ability to note which people appear in each photo and where in the photo they appear, users can not only see who is in a photo, but where in the photo a person appears
* ability to attach an arbitrary number of keywords to each photo
* ability to limit particular users to only viewing photos with particular keywords
* ability to search for photos that match chosen keywords or feature particular people
* can have an arbitrary number of photo types (ie. little, big, movie, etc.)
* photos of different types can easily co-exist in one collection
* multi-language support (but I only know English)... read more

Version 0.95 of the photo album has just been released. This release is mostly intended to simplify the job of the album administrator. The only new feature from the user's point of view is the addition of a 'Next Photo' link on the photo page (some people don't notice that you just click on the current photo to proceed to the next). For the admin, installation and upgrading of the database tables is now much easier, setting categories when creating toc entires is easier, and more documentation has been written (and is also available online). A variety of bug fixes have also been applied.... read more

It has just come to my attention that the online demo of the administration interface has not been working. I wish someone would have metioned this earlier. Anyway, it works now. Feel free to play with it. You shouldn't be able to do any damage, but if you can, let me know so I can fix it.

A couple of people have informed me about two relatively minor, but show stopping (if you don't notice them) bugs. The first one occurs if you use MySQL. To create the tables you need to edit the create-tables.sql file and remove all the comments (everything after the --'s).

The second bug appears in the following lines of constants.php3:

$copyright_name = "Your Name";
$copyright_email = "Your.Name@somewhere.com"
$siteadmin_name = "Your Name";
$siteadmin_email = "Your.Name@somewhere.com"
$survey_email = "Your.Name@somewhere.com"... read more

Version 0.93 contains a bunch of new stuff (read the NEWS file), but also one relatively serious bug. It seems that URL's should be encoded page?params#anchor, not page#anchor?params. This problem affects Mozilla (Netscape 6) and maybe IE. I do my testing with Netscape 4.7 so I didn't see the problem. Version 0.94 is exactly the same as 0.93 except for the one bug fix.

Version 0.92 contains many improvements to get/post parameter checking, MySQL support, and other source level improvements. The live demo for this project is now online and accessable through the project home page. The online demo uses sourceforge's MySQL server.

If you are waiting to see the offline demo, don't hold your breath. I will get it done as I need it for my own personal photo album, but it may take a couple of weeks.... read more

Version 0.91 has been released. I didn't get a chance to do everything I wanted to do (like finishing the port to MySQL), but I felt I should release anyway because this version is a major improvement over 0.9. As soon as sourceforge grants me access to their MySQL server, I will finish the port to MySQL and post the online demo. Hopefully, in about a week or so version 0.92 will be out.

My Virtual Photo Album project has just been moved to sourceforge. The 0.9 release is pretty old and contains very poor documentation so if you are interested, you should probably wait for 0.91 which I hope to have out by Friday.
Also, look forward to an online demo of the photo album which should also be available by Friday.