Review by While the developers at silverorange are hard at work building a new photo gallery system, I was impatient and wanted to try a photoblog style site instead of a traditional gallery. Without wanting to take too much time setting anything up or building something new for a temporary system, I downloaded folderblog and started using it.
Folderblog does not require much work. There is no database and the order you see your photos is strictly based on the files timestamp. Uploading a new photo is as simple as adding another image to the photos directory. Thumbnails are auto generated and the new photo instantly becomes the newest image live on the site.
If you want a photo to be inside a category, just upload the photo to a subdirectory. For example: photos/image.jpg is not in a category but photos/flowers/image.jpg will appear on the site in a category called flowers.
After you upload a file, you have a small admin page that allows you to add a title and description. The descriptions and visitor comments are saved as text files. One .txt file for each photo that is created and maintained by folderblog.
Folderblog does come with a default layout design but can be customized as much as you need. The site design operates on only a couple files. An index, the archives page and a css file. These are all html and you do not need to deal with any of the php code.
This is no more complicated then unzipping the download, editing settings.php with your site name, email etc and uploading to your webserver. Done.
After installing, there are a few files that makes everything work. You'll see two directories for large and thumbnail images and two directories for descriptions and comments. The root directory has about 7 php files which is a mix of variable settings, layout files and the php functions that ties everything together.
Yes but someday I'll eventually switch over to a more powerful system but only because I work with a company actively building our own photo system. Folderblog has done it's job very well for the past year and will probably continue to do so well into 2008.
If you are looking for a quick and easy way to get up and running in a couple of minutes, folderblog is worth considering.
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Comments
Kevin - January 2, 2008 10:37 pm
I'm glad to see somebody else is still using this. It looks to be exactly what I want right now, but it just wont work. Did you have to do anything special other than the edit 'n' upload described? What version of PHP does your server use? My host throws a ton of errors at me. =(
Thanks!
Kevin - January 3, 2008 8:39 pm
Addendum to my comment: I can't say why, these errors suddenly went away today. I didn't change a thing! Thanks anyway, keep up the good writing/reviewing.