Hi, I've just learned of Zenphoto and it looks to be a great application. I'm planning on installing and using the app, but prior to doing so I just wanted to ask for advice to make sure I set it up the best way possible the first time and not have to scrub and restart a few times.
I have a small wordpress blog about the retail industry in which I follow large ecommerce sites and retail companies. On my wordpress site, I have a small mashup application that tracks data about the sites, including a screen shot of the related ecommerce site. I've been doing this for a few months, and plan to continue to take a screen shot each month so that eventually you can look back on an ecommerce site and see how the design and functionality has changed. Anyways, instead of building a gallery of sorts to view the images, I'm hoping to use zenphoto.
Some basic details:
I track about 500 sites, broken down into about 15 categories. So about 33 sites per category, but some are ~50, and others are ~25.
I'm thinking that I would structure it as follows..
domain/photos/category/site/
I assume the directory structure on the server will resemble the same.
I plan to ftp all of the photos up to this structure, automatically each month and it will create new directories(if need be) and place the files inside.
The file names will be something like walmart20080228.jpg.
One question I have here is if zenphoto has a way to automatically sort the images in the album decending so the last photo taken is shown first.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how this should be structured differently? One of my main concerns is that I will have so many albums and that it will be unwieldy for a use to browse through. But I want a way for someone to be able to look at just the walmart screenshots for the past year, so placing them in an album seems to make sense.
Are there any limitations on the number of categories or albums that zenphoto will support?
I would also like to programatically show the last screenshot for a given site in my application. This could be as simple as my naming convention and knowing that all photos end in 20080228.jpg and changing it each month in my app when I load knew pics, but if there's a better way to get last image, that would be great too.
Anything I'm missing?
I plan
Zenphoto
Comments
yes you can sort an album so that last uploaded image is seen first in an album by seting the sort to ID
as for the user to browse your site, you can put the sites in the structure as you suggest but besides that you canb do some other things which will give extra usability in browsing the site;
you can make use of tags, so for example a wallmart picture and choosen pictures from other companys
could have a tag as for example 'toys'. this tag can be visible in a tagcloud in your navigation page.
or can be used to generate a dynamic album that can show up as an album or subalbum anywhere you want. You can also generate a dynamic album that is set to be invisible but can be accesed by a link to it in an image's or album description by inserting it.
off course also normal albums can be set to invisible but being reached by a link
or you can make links with predifined searches by putting `wood` which shows the search results for the word wood in any title, tag description etc
i don't think there are limitations..
to show the latest screenshot from an album there's a zenphoto function so that is easy
`<?php printLatestImages(6,'wallmart'); >` will show the 6 latest screenshots from wallmart
I think if you'll get some familiar with zenphoto you'll notice almost anything can be done with it and if not the amazing developers of zenphoto will have implemented it the next day..