Porting a Movabletype powered photo gallery to Zenphoto

KO

I currently use a Movabletype powered photo gallery, built in the dark ages of the internet when there was no Ajax or Zenphoto around! You can see it in action here: http://www.offroadpakistan.com/pictures/

I've used Zenphoto on a number of sites, and it's the bees knees.

I was wondering, is it possible to port over my MT powered photo gallery to Zenphoto?

The way I use MT as a photo gallery is the following:

Title field - this is the title of the photo
Entry Field - this is the photo description
Entry Extended field - here I put the url of the picture

Comments - this is however MT4.01 stores them in the db for each entry.

Is it possible to extract this info from the MT db and transfer it over to Zenphoto somehow?

Another possibility I was thinking of putting all the new photos in Zenphoto, but then I would have two seperate photo galleries on the website, which I don't want.

At the moment, creating new photos is a very tedious process, as I resize them, make thumbnails, upload them, then manually create a new entry for each photo! Also, it's a pain to reorganize them etc. So what happens in essence is that many photos never get uploaded.

Any help on this would be most appreciated!

sbillard

Zenphoto also stores information in a database. With some SQL knowledge you should be able to extract informatin from your MT database and insert it into a zenphoto one. We don't put the url of the photo in the DB, that is kind of implied by the DB structure.

Does MT have an album structure? If not that simplifies the transfer. Just create an album in zenphoto for your old images. Then the data load can be restricted by looking for image records whose `albumid` is the album you created and whose `filename` is the image name part of the Entgry Extended filed. If MT has an album structure you will have to match the album name with a zenphoto album recored and use that id when you are updating the image table.

KO

Each album is a different category in MT. The images for each album are also stored in their own subdirectory, so I could copy them over to Zenphoto - so the picture gallery would be up and running, I would now need tocopy the info for each image over to the ZP database.

I know a bit of SQL (through phpmyadmin), but not enough to figure out how to connect to the two seperate DB's, and transfer the photo descriptions and comments to the right fields in Zenphoto.

If I copy all the image files into album folders in a Zenphoto install, so the basic album structure is there, how would I go about copying the other stuff over?

sbillard

I think the only way short of manually inserting the data is to write an SQL script that will query your MT database and update the zenphoto one. It sounds like this may be more than you know how to do, so I guess you need to find someone with good SQL skills to help you out. If you provide him with the database schema for the two databases I am sure he can quickly create a script that will copy the data from one into the other.