Everybody has heard the “a picture is worth a thousand words” proverb. That’s true. It is important to be able to manage and organize our pictures, especially when we have a relatively large amount of web storage space. One of the ways to accomplish this is by setting up web-based image gallery management applications. In this article, we are going to tackle this subject and present some real-world applicable solutions.
First of all, this article presumes that you either have a web server of your own or one that you pay for (as a web space) with the necessary server-side services already running and configured appropriately (PHP, MySQL, Apache, etc.). Second, we are going to consider free options for the applications we'll present throughout this article.
As a result, I have picked 4images Gallery and Coppermine Gallery. Moreover, as an extension to the previous list of requirements, it is strongly advised that you have installed either GD or ImageMagick. These are open-source software suites that offer hundreds of image-based tasks, such as conversions, transforming, resizing, animating, thumbnails, etc. Therefore, both galleries require one or the other in order to work full-throttle.
Surely, if you have acquired your web space through a web hosting provider or network operator center, then they are almost always already hooked up and configured for you. On the other hand, if you are running your own server, then setting up these requirements won't be much of a hassle -- a few minutes at most.
Last but definitely not least, before we begin, I'd like to suggest my earlier articles on the topic of setting up web-based applications. They are published here on Dev Shed too. I'm referring to the following two: "Setting Up a Web-Based File Manager: bfExplorer" and "Setting Up a Web-Based File Manager: PHPfileNavigator." Be sure to read these as well because you cannot know when you might need one of them.
Having said this, we're ready to go. Let's see how we can set up these two web applications and what their most outstanding and unique key features are.
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