Picture imperfect

Rrg. And, also, argh.

So a month or so ago, I tried uploading some new photos to my Gallery. I’d done tihs not too long before that, and so I was surprised when it …

… didn’t work.

I dug and probed and prodded, and finally consulted with HostingMatters tech staff.

Ah. They’ve disabled exec() in PHP. Which, knowing those guys, is absolutely the Right Thing to Do form a security standpoint. But it pretty much hoses me. Gallery more or less relies upon that function in order to invoke the correct packages to do thumbnails, as well as, it seems, in a number of other functions. Digging through the Gallery pages indicates that, well, yeah, you need to have exec(), though there are indications that with a lot of poking and tweaking you can get some of it limping along without it, though buggily.

Harumph.

So I’m in search of a non-hosted photo solution. Yes, there are services like Flickr and the like. But call me a control freak — I want to host my photos myself, up on hill-kleerup.org, where I can reach out and “touch” them at any time. But, clearly, doing something like loading photo gallery software is not a good idea because of the dangers involved (both in execution and in the software being abruptly crippled in response to security). Plus, damn, I hate dealing with PHP and CGI stuff if I don’t have to.

So, what I need is something that will let me organize my photos on my PC, publish them in a viewable, HTML-based format online (non-proprietary, so that I can get to them later if need be without the application). Something that would allow, as I’ve done in Gallery, groupings of photos (by year, but also by function, e.g., “KOA”) is necessary, too.

I’d prefer something either Open Source or otherwise non-proprietary for the PC, too. I may end up looking at some professional commericial packages, but I’d rather avoid them if I can.

I ran across Snaplog early in this search, and it’s got the right idea, just not quite going far enough with it (see here for an example of it in use). It’s almost stupidly easy to use (find a pic on your hard drive, type in a title and caption, post it). It doesn’t try to be a photo editor as well as a gallery system, which is nice. But it’s too much of a “here is a string of photos by date and time,” which is what some folks want, but I don’t.

There are various solutions folks have come up with regarding using Movable Type as a photo gallery, and I’ll probably look at them, too. Though I’m a bit worried about stuff that then relies too much on versions of MT.

More to follow, including the pictures of Katherine’s First Day of Kindergarten that I wasn’t able to load into Gallery, dagnabbit.