Symlink vs Remote Album

joshnat

Hi, newbie problem here. Installed 1.4.6 on Ubuntu 14.10. Had to mess around with ownership and permissions quite a bit to make it work, as the install script didn't like how it was set up. I'm using it for family/home use, not professional.

My installation is at /var/www/zenphoto

Anyway, I'm trying to make Zenphoto expose my existing photo/video folder, which is as ~/Pictures. I've tried setting a symlink to ~/Pictures in the /albums folder. The Pictures album shows up in the admin console, but is listed as having no images (it's got 17,000 images/videos all in a single folder (red flag?).

Then I tried editing zenphoto.cfg.php to make the album remote, and set it as ~/Pictures directly. No joy.

I feel like I must be missing something really basic, but I don't know what. Do I have too many files in my ~/Pictures folder for zenphoto to parse? Is there a permissions/ownership problem with the symlink or the remote folder?

One last detail. In both approaches, the zenphoto admin panel shows a few thousand images in the gallery, but when I go to view the gallery, it's completely empty (doesn't even show created album folders).

acrylian

Sorry for the trouble. Setup tries to get info from the server and if that reports wrong or does not let it change them that can cause trouble. There is an article:
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/permissions-for-zenphoto-files-and-folders

So the folder is on the normal harddisk but outside the webserver. That will not work. Zenphoto does not support an albums folder from external remote sources. The albums folder must be on the server. It can be above the webroot though (that is what the config file option is about).
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/using-external-sources

17,000 images in one folder is a lot. Zenphoto can handle that if the server can. Please read here how the image discovery from the file system works:
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/caching

joshnat

Thanks for the reply. As long as I have the albums folder within the webserver, I should be able to symlink folders from outside, correct? However, this approach doesn't work for me. The symlink gallery doesn't appear in the user view, although it does show up in the admin view with no editable options.

acrylian

Sorry, this has not been tested by us at all. I mean somehow did something similar but I don't remember exactly. You should also review the error logs. On some server setups symlinks may not work at all or outside linking is prohibited by a security setting for example.

sbillard

You can have your album outside the WEB path if you set it up in the config file. Instructions are in the comments of the file. There are some javascripts that may not work, though, since they will not be able to directly load the images.

symlink does also work fine and is probably your best approach. Just make the "album" folder a symlink to the actual folder. I have all of my testing installations setup this way--eliminates the need to have multiple copies of the images.

Having a single album as a simlink should work as well, but I have not tried that.

Since the images are seen by the admin interface but not from the front end you are most likely getting a processing problem in the image caching. The number of images in the folder is quite large, so it may take too long to process all the images on your server and you server/browser is timing out.