fouldsy.com

Well, I’ve been playing around quite a bit the last day or two. As I’d pulled down an update to The Gimp (no jokes please - check the website if you don’t know what it is!), I wanted a chance to try it out. Usually I’m crap with graphical stuff, but the spiffy logo at the top of the site was knocked up in about 5 minutes and will stay until I get bored!

I’ve also integrated my photo gallery completely, thanks largely to the Wordpress Coppermine integration plugin which is pretty cool. Let’s me grab photos straight from the gallery and put them into postings, and upload photos directly into the gallery from Wordpress. Plus, with a change to the search section, whenever you search for something, it will also pull back results from the available photos and albums in the gallery! The gallery itself has been themed to match the Kubrick theme the blog runs off, but heavily modified to take version 1.4.3 of Coppermine. The theme only existed for 1.3.x - anyone after a copy, let me know.

I knew setting up Coppermine to run my photo gallery would lead to tinkering, and browsing through the Coppermine forums brought me to a rather interesting hack - integrating your photos with Google Maps and Google Earth.

It’s fairly straightforward to configure, just time consuming (but well worth it!) to go through selecting the location on the map for each of your photos. Also, I’m now looking at breaking it down to provide maps only for certain albums, such as my Macbackpacking tour of Scotland, or our road trip planned for the summer.

So, be a little patient whilst all the data loads when selecting the first link to display the maps, and remember you’ll need Google Earth installed for the second link

• View my photos on Google Maps
• And even cooler, view them on Google Earth

All credit to TranzNDance for these two excellent hacks. If you want to give this a go yourself, read through integrating with Google Maps and integrating with Google Earth from the Coppermine forums.

With the photo gallery up and running, I was after a way of grabbing basic stats from Coppermine and integrating this alongside the blog stats. Coppermine has some quite nice stats built into, and I was keen to simply get a quick photo + album count. Unless I’m missing something obvious, there doesn’t seem to be a a simple way of getting this out of the database. In the end, cpmFetch seemed like a straight-forward way of doing it, short of writing my own SQL queries, and although I’m not likely to use the ability to grab photos straight from the gallery, at least the functionality is there.

For anyone looking at getting basic stats from Coppermine, simply adjust the location of your cpmFetch install, and customise the formatting of the output:

require_once "gallery/cpmfetch/cpmfetch.php";
$objCpm = new cpm('/gallery');
$objCpm->cpm_formatStats('Gallery: %f photos in %a albums');
$objCpm->cpm_close();

I’ve pretty much got Coppermine image gallery working now, and have shuffled across most of the photos from the old galleries. Annoyingly, I’d looked at Coppermine about a year ago, but didn’t think I’d need something quite as complex and ended up adjusting pMachine to work as an image gallery. Think I’ve just about got enough photos to warrant a proper image gallery now, and reckon there might be a few more to upload this summer!

Anyways, check out my new image gallery here! Sure there’ll be some more tinkering yet, but at least it’s got them back online