Sorry, this is a long post and my English sucks.. please bare with me.

It took me weeks to find right software for my gallery and this was exactly what doctor ordered. Piwigo answered all my technical needs and it was really quite easy to modify it further to my liking. KUDOS TO PIWIGO TEAM!

I made a "family gallery" for me, my brother and sisters and my mother. I have scanned nearly all our paper photos (from year 1936 to 2003), old letters from our grandparents, misc. newspaper clips, some postcards and everything like that from everyone in my family. More recent photos from DSLR's and other digital cameras are there too.

I have now about 2000 pictures in our gallery and there are still about 2000 pictures "to be uploaded".

This is painfully slow project, but once it will be "finished", it will be a great resource for all of us. Even now when it is about 60% finished my sisters kids are making "discoveries" from our gallery: "Mom, did you REALLY look like that..." :D

Modifications to Piwigo

All modifications were made because I wanted to simplify Piwigo for my 62 years old mother. Every modification was made to templates, to "config_local.inc.php" and no modifications what so ever was made to original source code to ensure (possible) future upgrades.

My slightly simplified theme

- removed some functionality (for example: slideshow, ratings)
- removed images from toolbars and converted them "text links". Those are much easier to understand.
- redesigned almost completely "picture.tpl" to eliminate scrolling up/down. I removed also some "technical info" from sight. We don’t care about picture dimensions or filename in servers file system (etc.).
- translated our gallery to Finnish (my translation is slightly incompatible with clean Piwigo installation, due my custom theme.)

I made just one small modification to Admin panel: disabled changing "original picture name". I added "disabled" to all <input ...> tags in corresponding admin templates. And the reason for this? If someone wants hi-resolution version or printed paper version, it’s really fast for me to find original picture using its original name. If someone changes the original picture name, finding original picture could be really slow. (Hint to developers: could this be a setting in config_local.inc.php in future versions of Piwigo?)

Installed plugins

- "Advanced Menu Manager" and "Grum Plugins Classes.2" to remove some menu items. (There should be a possibility to do this without plugins. Grrr!)
- db backup (just for my convenience - faster to use than phpMyAdmin).

I also disabled access to some files and image hotlinking with .htaccess (for example: no access to notification.php and feed.php). I didn’t remove any original files, because: "Do not harm the original source code".


Preparations, tips and my workflow

Unfortunately our gallery isn't public due its personal nature. Never the less, I'll try to describe my workflow, if someone is going to do something similar. You may find some useful tips there. Good preparations for this kind of project are essential!

1) Get a good and fast scanner. I bought Canon CanoScan 8800F but nearly all flatbed scanners in the market today are quality-wise sufficient. Pay attention to scanning speed - you will appreciate fast scanner if you have a many pictures to scan!

- I wasn’t quite happy with bundled software, so I bought VueScan Pro. Now scanning similar sized pictures is really easy: prescan and crop the first picture and scan it. After that change picture and press enter, change picture and press enter, (repeat until you are too bored or you are out of pictures). VueScan does the rest without the need of host program and/or entering filename for scanned pictures.

- I scanned the photos 600 dpi/48bit colors/TIFF (to maximize possible future post-processing and printing). But this is just me, you may be happy with other settings.

2) I imported scanned pictures to Adobe Lightroom and converted them to DNG. Excellent program for huge amount of pictures. Lightroom is not limited only for pictures coming from digital cameras. DNG format is just my personal preference and it is a little bit smaller than TIFF too. During import Lightroom renamed every picture to sc-nnnnn for me, where nnnnn is counter.

3) I did quick/basic corrections + cropping and organized pictures with Lightroom and exported them to fit 800*600 dimensions, jpg format.

- Pictures taken with digital camera were processed same way - except scanning of course (and renaming).

4) I uploaded exported pictures with pLoader to previously made categories. There are no hi-res pictures available in our gallery, except some newspaper clips (easier to read text).

5) Basic descriptions and tagging were made as a collaborative project in Piwigo. I did some, my sisters and brother did some and even my dear old mother did some. Now, with descriptions and tags in place, searching specific photos is quite powerful and easy!

Hope this helps someone who is considering similar project. It takes a lot of time, but once finished, it will be a great joy! This may sound a bit stupid, but our gallery somehow brought our family members a little bit more "together", as we all live in different parts of Finland. This is a great project where everyone in our family can participate and Piwigo is just the right tool for you!

Last edited by paavor (2009-09-28 17:30:00)