Photobob

I don't have a lot to say about photobob. It's the 7th or so photo album package I've written, and probably the best. You just put pictures and movies in a directory, and away you go. This works really well with an automated digicam photo sucking thing.

Like all web applications I write, photobob does not use tables for layout, and will change layout depending on your browser's width. It uses CSS but still looks passable in non-CSS browsers. There is no database back-end because it doesn't need one. It's just files in directories.

Motivation

I want my photo albums to survive longer than the software that serves them up. My grandparents have shoeboxes full of photos, categorized by date and event. This is nice because it doesn't require any additional tools to determine the categorization.

All the web-based photo albums I've run across require some way to store metadata. In one extreme example (PHP Gallery), all the images are stored in one flat directory. Should the metadata ever become corrupted or disappear, or should you decide to switch programs, you're left with a huge mess and your categorization work is lost.

Photobob uses the file system as its categorization. You put photos in directories, and attach comments to the photos themselves (using the JFIF comment field). This makes it easy to press CDs or DVDs of your photo albums and still preserve the categorization and narration you've done. Should you decide to quit using Photobob, your photos will still be tucked away in their directories, with no droppings from the album software.

Photobob also takes advantage of a special property of JPEG files: size reductions by powers of two (½, ¼, 1/8, etc.) are a very inexpensive operation when done at decoding time. Additionally, many digital cameras write small "thumbnail" images in the JFIF headers. Photobob takes advantage of both of these properties to serve up scaled images quickly and without needing to write anything to the hard drive.

Getting it

It's not really packaged up for distribution, but that's only because I doubt anyone will want it. If you're interested in trying it out on your site, email me and I'll be glad to help you set it up.

You can check out the woozle albums for a live demo.

To get your own copy, run

 git clone http://woozle.org/~neale/projects/photobob

Or you can do a download the latest commit as a tarball.