This manual will describe how to start using Zoph. It assumes you have successfully installed all the components and are presented the logon screen when you visit http://localhost/zoph/logon.php.
Prior to version 0.3.3 this document was referred to as the tutorial.
An admin user was created when you loaded the database. You should be able to login as 'admin' using the password 'admin'. You will be presented with Zoph's home page where you will be greeted as 'Unknown Person'. There will be a blank square where a random photo would normally appear.
The first thing you should do is change the admin's password:
Next, create a 'person' record for yourself:
Now create a user for yourself:
An admin has permission to do anything so you don't need to grant the specific 'browse' or 'view details' permissions, nor grant permissions to individual albums.
Now that you have created a user:
Before importing some images we'll create an album to put them in. Note that you do not need to assign photos to an album if you don't want to.
To create an album:
To create a category, click on the 'category' tab and do exactly as above. In creating this tutorial I took a picture of my hand so I created an "Appendages" category for it.
Both albums and categories are hierarchical in nature (each entry can have children entries as well). When you view photos in an album or category within Zoph you automatically see photos placed in that album or category's children as well.
To create a place:
This section describes the command line Perl importer. The next one talks about the web based importer.
First get some images to load. Zoph was created to manage photos taken by digital cameras (which contain info in their exif headers) but you could use anything.
You should have defined an IMAGE_DIR variable in config.inc.php during installation. For this example, I have the image service disabled and my IMAGE_DIR set to a photos directory in my home directory. I have created a symbolic link from zoph/photos (off the web server's doc root) to this directory:
> ln -s $HOME/photos /var/www/zoph/photos
You can organize your photos under this directory in any way you choose. I'll provide examples of two possible systems. Read over these minimal examples before actually loading your photos.
Within my images directory I separate things by camera and by date. I have a Kodak DC280 so I created a dc280 directory:
> pwd
/home/jgeiger/photos
> ls
dc280
Here is one way to import photos. I store photos to be imported in an incoming directory in my home directory.
> ls ~/incoming
DCP_0155.JPG
> zophImport.pl --path dc280 --datedDirs ~/incoming/*.JPG
The --path flag tells the importer I want the photos to be put in the dc280 directory. The --datedDirs flag means that the photo should be put in a subdirectory based on the date field found in the photos Exif header. After running the script:
> ls dc280
2002.03.14
> ls dc280/2002.03.14
DCP_0155.JPG mid thumb
The mid/ and thumb/ directories hold images scaled down to 120 and 480 pixels respectively. If you wonder why zophImport.pl takes so long to import photos it is because it is creating these two smaller images (using ImageMagick's convert utility).
What if you don't want to use dated directories to store your images? Here is an alternative way:
> pwd
/home/jgeiger/photos
> mkdir christmas_2001
> zophImport.pl --path christmas_2001 ~/incoming/*.JPG
> ls christmas_2001
DCP_0155.JPG mid thumb
The same result could have been accomplished by:
> mkdir christmas_2001
> mv ~/incoming/*.JPG christmas_2001/
> zophImport.pl christmas_2001/*.JPG
By not specifying a path, the importer uses the path that the photos are currently in.
Whatever way you import photos, make sure you run the script from within your photos directory (as specified by IMAGE_DIR). The importer needs to be able to correctly extract the relative path to the photos from here to be stored in the database.
It is best to set as much information about photos during import so you don't have to do it one photo at a time within Zoph. I often have a directory of images to import that were all taken at the same time which makes this easy to do.
Here is what I used to load the images I took for this tutorial:
> pwd
/home/jgeiger/photos
> zophImport.pl --path dc280 --datedDirs --photographer "Jason Geiger" --location "Jason's Apartment" --album "Zoph Tutorial" ~/incoming/*.JPG
To use the --photographer, --location and --album parameters, corresponding records must have been previously created in Zoph. So first create a person/place/album/category using the web interface, then import using them.
What if you made a mistake, or remembered a piece of information you want to add? Pass the --update parameter so that the photos will not be inserted again:
> zophImport.pl --update --field rating=5 --field description="This is part of the zoph tutorial" dc280/2002.03.14/*.JPG
This will set the rating and description for all the photos I just imported. To set any of the fields found in the photos table (such as rating, title, description, etc), use the --field NAME=VALUE flag.
For more info and examples about the importer, see the section at the end of this document.
It is not uncommon to make a mistake while loading images so that when you view the ui you see a bunch of broken images. This most likely due to an invalid path. To check, edit one of the images in Zoph and click on "show additional attributes" at the bottom. Then you should be able to see the path info. It should always be the case that WEB_IMAGE_PATH (or IMAGE_PATH) + the photo's path field + the photo's name reflects the photo's location.
You can use the importer to correct the paths for broken images:
> zophImport.pl --update --path 'dc280/2002.03.14' dc280/2002.03.14/*.JPG
If you still see broken images, check the permissions on the files and directories.
The web based importer is a new template in Zoph 0.3 that provides an alternative to the command line importer, zophImport.pl. This template does not yet contain all the functionality of zophImport.pl.
To use the importer, WEB_IMPORT must be set to 1 in config.inc.php and you must be logged in as either an admin or a user that has been granted permission to import.
If you are going to be importing directories of photos you will probably need to increase the size of max_execution_time in php.ini. The default is 30 seconds but you will probably need this to be a couple minutes or more, depending on how many images you import and how fast your computer is.
If you are running PHP >= 4.2, the importer will try to read the EXIF headers of the images you are loading. Beware that if you specify a date and an EXIF date header is found, the EXIF date will overwrite your date field.
Files can be loaded in two ways:
To be able to upload archives you need to define the programs with which to do the extraction in config.inc.php. Example are given. Archives are extracted to a temporary directory created with the EXTRACT_DIR defined in config.inc.php. This directory should be writable by the webserver. The zip or tar files themselves are copies to the same location as the images and are not removed by Zoph.
2. Importing Files on the Server - the uploading step can be skipped for files already on the server running Zoph. This method also allows you to load a directory of images at once. Specify an absolute path in 'file/directory'.
If you are loading a directory of images, the fields you specify will apply to all of them.
In order to copy images and create thumbnails Zoph needs write permission to the directory you are importing to. The simplest but least secure way to do this is to give the import directory 777 permissions. Alternatively, you could try creating a new group, put yourself and the webserver user in that group, and give the group write permission to the directory.
Files and directories are affected by the IMPORT_UMASK in config.inc.php. The default setting is 0 which leads to files with 777 permissions. Directories are created with DIR_MODE permissions, the default is also 777.
So by default everything created by the importer is open to everyone. Beware!
Now that there are some photos in the database, I'll go over some features of the web interface. The UI is fairly self explanatory so you probably don't really have to read this section.
There are numerous ways to find the photos you just entered, a few of which are:
By default the results page will show thumbnails of up to 12 photos (you can change this from the 'prefs' page). On the prefs page you can also choose whether or not to display descriptions under the thumbnails.
From this page you can:
Here you'll see a mid sized version of the photo plus all the information about the photo available.
From this page you can:
If you set the auto edit pref, you will automatically be presented with fields to edit the info about a photo whenever you click on a thumbnail. Clicking [ return ] takes you back to the regular view.
The slideshow mode (entered from the results page) will cycle through the current set of photos by refreshing the browser window. The interval between refreshes can be set on the 'prefs' page.
From the slideshow page you can:
You can search for photos using multiple criteria on the search page. Note that when you select an album or category, all descendant albums or categories will also automatically be chosen.
By default all criteria are joined by "and". You can choose "or" instead from the pulldowns in the left most column. Since you can not specify groupings of the conditions, you might not get the results you want if you try to construct complex queries using different conjunctions.
Note that the album, category, location, person and photographer menus are pruned so that only those entries that actually appear in a photo that the user has access to are shown.
The thumbnail that appears on the 'home' page is randomly selected. I tend to like this photo to be somewhat good so I created a setting on the 'prefs' page that lets you specify the minimum rating to be used when selecting a random photo.
If you want to create a never ending slideshow of random photos, you can do this by clicking the "randomly chosen photo" link on the home page. If you then click the [ Slideshow ] link on the results page a new random photo will be chosen for each slide.
Lightboxes give someone a place to gather and share their favorite photos. In Zoph, lightboxes are simply albums. When editing a user, an admin can declare a certain album to be the lightbox for that user. The admin must grant the user permission to view the lightbox album as well.
IMPORTANT: Don't give a user write permission on their lightbox album. The user could then add any photo to their lightbox and be able to edit it.
Whenever the user views a photo they can click a 'lightbox' link which will add that photo to their lightbox. When a user is viewing their lightbox, each photo will have an 'x' below it. Clicking this will remove that photo from the lightbox.
Lightboxes allow users to gather photos of interest to them without requiring the ability to edit a photo to place it in an album.
Lightboxes are only activated for a user by specifying a lightbox album. The setup I used was to create a "Lightbox" album, under which I created separate albums for each user's lightbox (e.g. "Jason's Lightbox").
To share a lightbox an admin must grant permission to that album to other users.
One of the features of Zoph is its system of access privileges. You have already created an admin class user for yourself. If you desire, you can create other users as well.
A description of some of the attributes of users follows:
The following only apply to non-Admin users:
For non-Admin users, permissions to view photos are granted on a per album basis. For each album you grant a user access to, you must specify:
Zoph determines whether a user has access to a photo checking two things:
If both of these conditions are met, the user has access to the photo.
If a photo appears in more than one album, a user needs only to have permission on one of them to see the photo. If the user has access to multiple albums in which a photo is found, the least restrictive (highest access level) permission is used.
The level of a photo (and therefore of access levels) can range from 0 to 10. The default access level is 5.
Zoph is designed so that these privileges should work transparently. It should appear to any user that they have access to all photos. There should be no reference to any album or photo (including photo counts) to which a user does not have access.
If an album is marked writable, that user may edit (but not delete) the photos that they have access to in that album.
If you want to grant a user access to all albums you can do this all at once and the access level and writable flag will apply to every album. This is handy if you want to let someone see everything but don't want them to change anything.
Note that when you create new albums you will have to grant permissions to any non-Admins before they will be able to see those album.
Say you create an account for your parents but you don't want them to see the photos in the "New Years Party" album. Simply don't grant them permission to that album.
However, say the photos in this album are mostly harmless, except for a few that you would like to keep hidden. In this case, change the level of those photos to 6 (or higher) and grant the user permission to the album with an access level of 5 (or less).
If you plan on having multiple users of Zoph and you are planning on hiding some pictures or albums from some users, you may want to turn on the image service in config.inc.php.
The simplest and fastest setup is to have the images served by the web server. However, this requires that the images are accessible to the web server. And if this is true, they are also accessible to any user. Even if the application never links to a photo that a user should not be allowed to see, that user could still view that photo (or any photo) by simply typing its url directly into their browser. Since the image names tend to follow a well defined pattern, it would not be too hard for someone to just guess image names and see what came up.
One solution to this problem is to have the application serve the images rather than the web server. This is what the image service does. If is is used, the IMAGE_DIR defined in config.inc.php should NOT be reachable by the web server. The image service will instead set the proper headers and read out the file itself.
Unfortunately, this makes Zoph slower and can make handling the images more cumbersome. If you don't care about people seeing all of your images, don't bother with the image service.
Zoph has all these privilege mechanisms, but don't trust them too much to keep your secret photos hidden. It is beta software and hasn't been tested nearly enough for you to assume you'll be protected.
Starting with Zoph 0.2.1 a default user can be defined. This user is automatically logged in when a person first opens Zoph in their browser.
If you use Zoph locally you may want to make yourself the default user so that you never have to bother logging in. You may also want to use this feature to create a guest account with limited permissions.
To create a guest user, first create a person record to associate with the user (this could just be first name Guest, last name User). Then create a guest user, grant that user whatever permissions you want and set the user's preferences. Whichever user is defined as the default user is unable to modify their preferences while they are the default.
You will now need to find the user_id of your guest user. The simplest way is probably to look at the url when you are viewing the users's record in zoph (user.php?user_id=3).
The default user is defined in config.inc.php:
// set to the id of a non admin user or to 0 to disable // note that this is a user_id, not a person_id define(DEFAULT_USER, 3);
That's it. Now when you hit /zoph/zoph.php for the first time you'll be logged in as the guest user (if you are already logged in as someone you'll first have to log out). You can also log out when you are the guest user to be able to log back in as someone else.
What if a guest hits logout and wants to get back in but doesn't know the guest account info? Hitting submit on the logon page without specifying a user name or password will log you in as the default user.
A user can customize Zoph using the preferences page. Below are descriptions of a few of the prefs.
Between the tabs and the title bar you'll see a list of breadcrumbs by default. On the prefs page You can specify the number of breadcrumbs to show or you can choose to disable the breadcrumbs completely.
One note about breadcrumbs: clicking on the small x to the right of the breadcrumbs will clear the list of crumbs.
The default value is 'Browser Default'. This means that Zoph will try to present itself in the language you can specify in your browser's settings. If no translations are present for any of the languages in your browser's list, English will be displayed by default.
If you specify a language on the prefs page instead of 'Browser Default' your setting will override whatever you have your browser set to.
If you would like to provide a translation for another language please let me know (zoph@nother.net). The language files are stored in php/lang. Creating a new translation involves creating a file in this directory with the language's two letter code. Use one of the existing (non English) language files as an example.
Here are descriptions of a few of the other prefs:
It's always a good idea to back up you photos. Periodically sync them to another machine or burn them to a cd. Zoph should never delete your photos, when you delete something from the ui only the database record is removed.
You should also periodically export the database. After you spend hours inserting and updating photos into Zoph, take two seconds and do the following:
> mysqldump -u zoph_admin -p zoph > zoph-`date +%Y%m%d`.sql
Zoph is dynamic sort of application tied closely to the database. But sometimes you want static html files of your photos to burn to a cd or whatnot. Zoph includes a perl script, zophExport.pl, that lets you easily create static galleries.
There are numerous programs whose focus is to generate these sorts of static photo albums. Though I included a very simple built-in static album generator, zophExport.pl is primarily intended to be used with other scripts. Currently two such programs are supported:
Both of these are easy to use and provided customizable interfaces.
Before you run the exporter make sure you configure it to use your database settings and image directory as described in the install doc.
Here is a command that creates an export for use with the album program:
> zophExport.pl --dir "~/Winter Pics" --format album --category Snow
After the exporter finishes it's up to you to run album. zophExport.pl prints out an example command to run album which you can copy and run as is or update with your own options.
In this simple example all photos placed in the Snow category are exported. Within the Christmas directory zophExport.pl will have created a directory structure mirroring the album structure in Zoph for the selected photos.
There are only two required arguments: the directory to export to (--dir) which will be created if it does not exist, and the format of the export (--format) which currently must be either "zoph", "album" or "bins".
Fields to search by are specified in the same was as in zophImport.pl. For example, you can say
> zophExport.pl --dir "~/My Album" --format album --album "Boston Trip" --photographer "Jason Geiger" --field rating=5
Only photos I took on my trip to Boston that I rated 5 or more would be exported. By default subalbums of an album are automatically included (so my "Duck Tour" subalbum is also exported). You can disable this by passing --nosubalbums. The same goes for categories (use --nosubcategories to disable). Most fields match using the equals operator. Two exceptions are rating (which defaults to >=) and description (which defaults to like).
You can probably do most things you want by using this system, especially since you can run zophExport.pl multiple times with different parameters, and even edit the results by hand if you wish, before you run album or bins to generate the galleries.
But if you have a particularly complicated query you want to run you can just pass it in directly using the --sql argument. Your query must select * from the photos table, other than that it can be anything. If you pass a sql statement any other constraint arguments are ignored. Make sure to only pass select statements, the script does no checking to make sure you aren't deleting all your data
Here's a tip if you run a complicated search within Zoph and then want to export only those photos. After you get to the results page open up config.inc.php and set DEBUG to 2. Then reload the results page and you should see two sql queries at the top of the page. Copy the first (the count query) and replace "count(distinct ph.photo_id)" with "ph.*", append "order by ph.date asc, ph.time asc" and pass this to zophExport.pl using the --sql argument.
By default zophExport.pl will export everything about your photos except the last modified time, the rating and the albums or categories in which the photo appears.
To prevent the display of a particular field, use the --noshowFIELD argument. For example: --noshowlocation or --noshowdescription. Passing --noshowexif prevents any exif info from being shown. (Note, however, that the BINS program extracts exif info on its own).
The exporter can translate field labels using the same language files that Zoph uses. Pass --lang /path/to/php/lang/file to enable this option.
By default the exporter creates directories to mirror the structure of the albums in which the exported photos appear. To disable this and have all the photos appear directly under the export dir use the --noalbumdirs flag.
The exporter contains the ability to generate a very simple static gallery. To use the simple exporter, pass --format zoph to zophExport.pl.
There are two advantages to this format. The first is that it requires no additional software. The second is speed. The simple format is much much faster simply because it uses the thumbnails already generated by Zoph whereas album and BINS generate their own. Someone could probably alter album or BINS so that they could reuse the thumbnails.
There's not really any elegant way to change the appearance of the gallery generated by this exporter. To do so you probably would want to edit zophExport.pl. It wouldn't be too difficult to add css support but I didn't. I only wanted to spend so much time reinventing the wheel.
album is written by David Ljung Madison.
http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/album/
album is a single perl script which requires nothing more than you already have from using Zoph (ImageMagick and Image::Size). A debian package is available.
To use album, specify --format album to zophExport.pl. The exporter will create a captions.txt file in each directory that contains images.
Album is themeable and a number of themes are available from the website. I'd recommend you download a different theme, or create your own, simply because the default theme displays all of the info about a photo on the thumbnails page which can be quite a bit if you include descriptions and exif data. You specify a theme by passing -theme /path/to/theme/dir to album.
BINS is written by Jerome Sautret, based on SWIGS, written by Brendan McMahan,
which was in turn based on IDS by John Moose.
http://bins.sautret.org/
BINS consists of three perl scripts, an exporter and two image/album description editors. A debian package is available. BINS requires a number of perl modules which you can get from CPAN if you need to.
To use BINS, specify --format bins to zophExport.pl. The exporter will create an image.jpg.xml file for each photo and an album.xml file in each directory.
BINS takes a source directory and a target directory. zophExport.pl will create the target directory based on the --dir you specify. It will also append ".tmp" to the target directory name and create another directory to which it will copy the images from Zoph and which will act as the source dir for BINS. You can remove this temp dir after BINS finishes. You can set the source and target directory to the same dir in BINS but you can only run BINS against that directory once, after that it will start creating thumbnails of the thumbnails, etc.
You can create a config xml file for BINS to use. I found it useful to set the defaultSize parameter to 0 (default to small images).
This section applies to the command line importer, zophImport.pl.
Here is a list of all the fields that can be set when importing:
Photos can appear in multiple albums and categories, and multiple people can be in a photo. To handle this, you can either pass a comma separated list or set the flag multiple times. Actually, you can use a comma separated list for categories and people but not for albums (since I realized that I have many albums with commas in their names and have yet to build an escape mechanism).
The following fields will be set automatically if they can be extracted from the EXIF header. They can also be set manually, using the --field NAME=VALUE flag, if you wish. This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible EXIF headers but these are the ones that have been set by the cameras I have used or that have been reported to me. The resolution and size fields are ignored, this info being instead extracted by Image::Size in the importer.
Below are a couple more examples.
Adding a list of people to a photo (if there are many people it is often faster to do this using the importer rather than through the web ui):
> zophImport.pl --update --people "Jason Geiger, Virginia Wolfe" dc280/2002.03.14/DCP_0155.JPG
People should be listed left to right, front to back. These people must already be the database. If one of the names could not be found the importer will complain.
Updating all the photos in a directory:
> find dc280/ -iname "*.jpg" -maxdepth 2 | xargs zophImport.pl --updateSize
You may want to use the --updateSize option like above if you had rotated or resized a bunch of images and wanted to get the correct dimensions into zoph. Specifying a maxdepth prevents the thumbnails from being included.
Starting in version 0.3 of the importer you can also update photos based on their photo_ids rather than names. Say you notice couple sequences of of your photos have an incorrect location. You can see the photo_id for a photos in the url and it may be simpler to update based on that rather than by passing the file names:
> zophImport.pl --update --useIds --location "Yuka's House" 1562-1571 1580-1585
Based on a suggestion from Alan Shutko, in version 0.3.1 of zophImport.pl I added +profile "*" to the calls to convert. (And in 0.3.3 I commented out this since for some users multiple thumbnails were being generated for an image. I did not see this problem, maybe it was a shell expansion issue. For most people it probably works so you may want to re-enable this feature.)
From http://www.imagemagick.org/www/convert.html:
"The '+profile "*"' removes any ICM, EXIF, IPTC, or other profiles that might be present in the input and aren't needed in the thumbnail."
This can result in a significant reduction in file sizes. If you do wish to preserve the profiles, remove this argument to convert.
Also, if you wish to regenerate your thumbnails after this change to save space, you can run a command like this from your image directory:
> find . -iname "*.jpg" -a -not -name "mid_*" -a -not -name "thumb_*" | xargs zophImport.pl --update --thumbnails
In this section I thought I'd mention a couple of tips if you are interested in trying to integrate Zoph with other parts of your website. This is still a work in progress.
Say you have a site that has its own person or user records and you would like to map between the two systems (you want to put a "photos of" link on the profile page of a user, for example). Though Zoph usually uses it's own person_id field, you can pass a name instead:
http://www.nother.net/zoph/photos.php?person=Geiger,Jason
will show you photos of a person. You also can use "photographer":
http://www.nother.net/zoph/photos.php?photographer=Geiger,Jason
Or instead of jumping to the photos page you can hit the person page:
http://www.nother.net/zoph/person.php?person=Geiger,Jason
For albums, categories and locations these sorts of lookups don't exist at the moment. But they are fairly easy to incorporate if anyone is interested.
Of course it is easy to generate urls for the other photo fields (that don't require joins) like title or description. Just call photos.php?field=val. Any string that does not start with an underscore is assumed to be a field to search on.
While developing Zoph I've discovered a couple of oddities which I'll mention below. Problems that have solutions are likely to appear in the FAQ.
For some reason this feature does not work with IE 5 for Mac OS X. Every other photo is shown or the same photo is shown over and over.
The slideshow involves a simple refresh header so I'm not sure what the problem is. It works correctly with IE for Windows and OmniWeb for OSX.
Slideshows worked fine for me using Netscape 4.7 under Linux and Windows but I have been told of one problem using Netscape under Windows where once the slideshow is finished the photo results page that you are redirected to starts refreshing itself. Browsing to another page stops the problem. This may be slightly annoying but at least it doesn't prevent the slideshow from functioning.
Some servers or clients seem to have a problem with preserving or decoding the attachments generated by the Mime class. The often seems related to how lines are terminated.
I have currently set things up to terminate lines with \n (and not a \r\n). Here is the behavior I have observed:
To play around with this, edit mail.php.
Most browsers still don't completely support optgroups in select tags. Mozilla and IE 5 for Windows label the pulldown according to the groups but do not display cascading menus. IE 5 Mac does attempt to display a cascading pulldown but it seems there is a problem where a cache get corrupted or something. I often see results from one pulldown being merged with another (people and places, for example). When I view the page source everything looks ok but somehow it is being displayed incorrectly.
You can set GROUPED_PULLDOWN_SIZE in config.inc.php to something small to experiment yourself.