Weatimages
powerful easy to use albums publishing script
 

Requirements

Web server with PHP 4.0.6 (or higher) and GD 2.0.1 (or higher).


Installation

Unpack file "index.php" from distributive archive and upload it to separate directory (e.g. "photos/") on your web server.

In order to enable caching capabilities, you need to create the new directory named "weatimages-cache" in directory with "index.php" and to set access rights 777 (rwxrwxrwx) to "weatimages-cache".

If you plan to customize configuration, upload "weatimages.ini" too.

Further in that manual assumed that your Weatimages installation path is "photos/", and your site domain name is "www.yoursite.com".


Configuration

Default configuration options works fine in most cases. So, you can miss this step painless.

Configuration options of Weatimages are stored in "weatimages.ini". Open it in any text editor and adjust needed settings in compliance with embedded instructions.


Using

Basics

To create an album just copy (via FTP) folder containing images from your computer to directory with Weatimages installed.

After adding new album to the Weatimages installation directory new album will appear at the Weatimages start page at http://www.yoursite.com/photos
You can go directly to any album using such address as http://www.yoursite.com/photos/index.php/ALBUMNAME where ALBUMNAME is the name of necessary album.

You can make nested albums by creating subfolders in any album and putting images to them.

Descriptions

Descriptions can be applied to any type of items listed by Weatimages - images, entire albums, and downloadable non-image objects.

Descriptions is optional Weatimages feature. It can be enabled or disabled, refer to the configuration file.

To use descriptions you need create file named "desc.txt" and put it in directory with described items.

File "desc.txt" must contain data in the next format:

ItemFileName.jpg Description of item
ItemFileName2 Description of second item, file extension omitted
SomeFileName Description of some other item
SomeFileName. Long description which will be shown only on page containning the big image

As can be seen, description of each item is placed on the single line. It is supposed that the filename of item (which described on current line) is located at the beginning of the line and separated from description body by the space (separating character may be changed by the "description_delimiter" parameter in configuration file).

Extension in the filename of item described may be omitted if it is not disallowed in configuration file.

There are defined two special "virtual filenames" - "." and "..". Description with the "." in place of filename is considered as the title of current album and will be shown at the top of album. Description with the ".." in place of filename is considered as the comment to title of current album and will be shown under the album title.

If filename is suffixed by the dot ("SomeFileName." or "SomeFileName.jpg."), following description will be shown only on page with big (or resized) copy of corresponding image.

If you use non-english characters in items descriptions, you may wish to specify the particular characters encoding for albums pages. In this case you should refer to "charset" parameter of configuration file.

Since version 1.6 Weatimages also trying to read descriptions from EXIF if it isn't prohibited by the config and PHP has EXIF extension. When image description stored in UNICODE format, Weatimages tries to recode it to encoding specified in 'charset' option of configuration file (only when MBSTRING extension loaded). Check MBSTRING module presence and value of 'charset' option if you experiencing problems with displaying of non-roman characters from exif tags. If Title/ImageDescription and Comment/UserComment EXIF tags is filled in, will be shown both.

Image description from the text file has priority over exif descriptions.

Objects hiding

When albums listing enables, you may to wish to hide some album from the listing. To hide album, assign name starting with the "." character to album directory (e.g. ".sensitivedata"). This prefix may be changed by using "hidden_prefix" parameter in configuration file.

Hidden albums will not be listed at the albums listings, so these albums can be accessed only by direct URL such as http://www.yoursite.com/photos/index.php/.sensitivedata


Updating

To update previous version of Weatimages replace old "index.php" with new "index.php".

If you have made changes in "weatimages.ini" from previous distributive version, you should check the new "weatimages.ini" for appearance of new configuration parameters, and add them to your current "weatimages.ini" file with your adjustments to experience full advantages of new version. The same actions should be performed with css and langpack files.