SmackFu: PHP Photo Captioner

PHP XML Photo Captioner
a web app to create XML caption files for my photos

This is a PHP web app that I wrote to store captions for my digital camera photos. It writes the data to an XML file in each directory. Then I use XSL to convert the XML files to my photo gallery pages. This makes it very flexible for display. It's pretty plain looking:

Setup

This requires PHP4. Just dump the captioner.php file into your photo directory. You can use this URL directly, or you can run it through a frameset, which makes it a little more convenient. The frameset I use is start.html, which puts the directory listing on the left and the actual editor on the right. If it doesn't work, make sure the PHP process is able to write files to the photo directory.

Customization

These variables at the top of the code should cover most needs:

$caption_filename: The default name for the description file is descript.xml. You can change this here.
$edit_meta: lists the fields that are stored for all photos in a directory (like title, date, etc.).
$edit_photos: lists the fields that are stored for each photo (like short description, long description).
$edit_dir: lists the fields that are stored for each directory. They are similar to the ones from the $edit_meta variable, but they are placed in the description file one level up.

Example output

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<photo_batch>
    <date>November 2001</date>
    <title>Real Italy</title>
    <directory name="Day02">
        <thumbnail>DSCF1399.JPG</thumbnail>
        <short_descript>Day 2 - Rome</short_descript>
    </directory>
    <photo filename="DSCF1399.JPG">
        <short_descript>The Fountain of the Four Rivers</short_descript>
        <long_descript>Much nicer w/o the flash.</long_descript>
    </photo>
</photo_batch>

Example XSL

This is the XSL that I use to generate the photo gallery on this site. I use xlstproc to generate the html, and wwwis to throw proper img height and width on.

photo_batch.xsl: This generates thumbnail pages. The thumbnails should be in a thumbs sub-directory under the photos. Each thumbnail links directly to the JPG.
photo_batch_files.xsl: This is the advanced version of the above. It extends it to link to individual html files for each photo. This makes it nicer when you give out a link to an individual photo.
photo.xsl: This generates the individual html files for each photo, if you're using the photo_batch_files.xsl template.

Neat trick: If you add a line like this to the top of the XML:

<?xml:stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="http://hostname/photo_batch.xsl"?>

you can open the XML files in IE 5.5 directly, without pre-generating html.