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Zenphoto goes (relatively) big time

At a glance

This entry was written on June 27, 2006.

The entry prior to this is entitled A tree grows in the forest.

The entry following this is entitled Database Journalism in the darkroom.

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This entry has been tagged as CSS, Recommended, Work, XHTML, javascript, mysql, php.

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I reviewed a release of Zenphoto a while back, and I never really forgot about this little gem of a GPL-licensed photo gallery program.

In fact, I've leveraged it to a pretty massive degree in a couple of projects.

The image processor in zenphoto (a single file called i.php, more or less) did all the thumbnailing for the LoHud.com U.S. Open site (instead of upping the max memory limit on the server to handle photographer's raw JPEGs, we did the intial resizing offline). It's also being called into service in our upcoming photo gallery system based off the Open galleries and in the image processor for my finally-realized web-based weblog poster (more on that in a later entry).

Perhaps biggest and most impressive, however, was its service in the LoHud.com Graduation photo galleries. In all, our photographers shot 95 high school and college graduations. They took a total of 6,714 photos. Using five separate installs of zenphoto, I managed to crank out galleries for all 95 of those graduations, complete with PayPal ordering of reprints and e-mail-to-a-friend functionality, in extremely short order (the longest part of the process was the initial resize I did offline before I uploaded the 400-pixel-sized photos).

And I didn't even use all of zenphoto's features to their full effect (no captions, no visible titles and the individual photo page isn't used at all except after you e-mail it to a friend).

Through the entire process, zenphoto gave me zero issues, zero headaches and zero hiccups despite the volume of photos (one install is handling 3,595 photos in 44 albums) and the volume in visitors (19,031 page views for the gallery front page over a six-day span ... with a high of nearly 5,000 on Friday).

Zenphoto's use of a folder-as-gallery architecture is a thing of beauty when it comes to gallery management as well. I simply created installs for Westchester County High Schools, Putnam County High Schools, Rockland County High Schools, Private High Schools and Colleges and then had folders in each install for each and every high school and college we shot. Then it was simply a matter of uploading the photos to the right folder.

The templating structure is nothing fancy, really, but I did manage to get it to bend into a template that used LightboxV2, complete with an order form (though that was more a wrangle with Lightbox ... again, another post).

I really can't say enough good things about this piece of software.

I suspect the developers might have a donation headed their way, pending any upcoming raise I get based off of their fantastic software.