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Zenphoto database schema

maddaze Member
in General support
I have a project to photograph and document the churches and chapels found in the bit of France where I live (Gironde). I anticipate that I'll finish with somewhere between 30 and 40 thousand photos. The plan is to use MediaWiki for a wiki devoted to the churches and then use an extension to get to the Zenphoto album for a particular church. I use Photoshop Elements Organizer to manage the photos, group them by church, apply tags and captions, put them in display order, and handle the interaction with the photo editor of Photoshop Elements.

Given the volume of photos, I don't want to manually reenter the data that's in PSE Organizer into Zenphoto. Via PHP I can extract the data I'm interested in from the SQLite database that PSE Organizer uses. Is the database schema for Zenphoto available? If so, I can generate the MySQL statements needed to update Zenphoto's MySQL database on tags, titles, sort order, etc. once I've moved the photos to the Web site.

Thanks for any help,
Harvey

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    The easiest would actually be to assign the needed data as EXIF/IPTC metadata to the images itself. That should not be a problem for those programs. Zenphoto will read that and add it automatically.

    Anyway I would strongly suggest to make some test drive before starting a project of that size. Especially you have to make sure that your server is able to process your photos. I assume their resolution will be quite large, so please read:
    http://www.zenphoto.org/2009/03/troubleshooting-zenphoto/#11

    The nightly build contains a PDF with the database table setup.
  • maddaze Member
    I'll investigate what facilities I have for inputting data into the jpeg's metadata. Thanks for the suggestion.

    While there are a lot of photos, their size is relatively modest (100k - 300k). These are not high-quality poster-ready photos, but rather light-weight Web-ready photos; the idea is create interest and help people discover the richness of the local heritage.

    Harvey
  • sbillard Member
    Also be aware of how you save the photos with Adobe. Avoid the "save for web" as it strips out all the metadata from the image! If PSE is anything like Bridge, it will put the metadata into the image as well as its database.
  • olihar Member
    You are easily able to save the meta-data to the JPG files using Elements. As far as I have seen just make sure you pick the right charset for it in the admin, Depending if you are a PC or a Mac user. That problem is coming from Adobe as they don't want to use standards like UTF-8 instead they use different charset on PC and MAC.

    Elements is most like the rest of Adobe products, there to say have this problem.
  • maddaze Member
    I've since downloaded the nightly build and located the file zenphoto_database_quick_reference.pdf with the db structure. Thanks for leading me to it.

    In my previous post I described the typical file size of my photos. Am I right in assuming that thousands of such smallish photos should not pose a problem for Zenphoto?

    Harvey
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    As the link I posted above points out the file size does not matter, but the image dimensions. Again, I suggest to test before starting the real project.
  • maddaze Member
    [The nightly build contains a PDF with the database table setup.]

    I spent some time studying this today. It's very helpful. Thanks again for the suggestion.

    I wonder if I haven't found an error. The table obj_to_tag shows its id column, which is auto-incremented, as a foreign key to the albums and comments tables. I suspect that should be the column objectid which is the foreign key rather than id.

    Harvey
  • maddaze Member
    I've loaded some tags into my test album and discovered the Zenphoto database seems to operate in a reasonable, straight-forward way. New tags get the next tag id, and that's used to connect tags to albums and images thru the obj_to_tag table.

    After examining what Photoshop Elements 6 does and doesn't do with the various bits of info one assigns to photos, I believe I can more safely update the Zenphoto database from the SQLite database underlying PSE6 rather than depend on the EXIF and IPTC data it puts in photos.

    Harvey
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    Good that it's helpful for you. About the obj_to_tag issue we would have to take a look. It seems not to cause any issue if it is an issue. If you like you could open a ticket so it is not forgotten.
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