MicrostockGroup

I have never used Drupal before, but I have been looking for a product that could be used by Photographers, not a flash site but for photographers that sell prints and downloads, yes there are products out there, but none that pull it all together for a Proper Image licencing site that is avaliable as a basic package to all under open source.

Drupal does not have all the functions that photographers need but looks managable, so I am hoping to form a collective of Photographer / Developers to create a set of modules to facilitate this, there are many many thousands of photographers out there that can write a bit of code, but we are badly serviced as far as software goes, many services charge monthly and promise but not many deliver.

Currently my sites run on DotNetNuke, but customisation is hard, and it is not to fast, the Photoshelter galleries are costing me over £300 a year, as there is no software I can load to my site that deal with Rights Managed pricing correctly, LightboxPhoto is the nearest but at $1000 over priced.

Now I need to pull it all together, see who is out there with skills that would like to add to a project that will be avaliable as open source for other Photographers, if there is anyone that has skills and a few hours a week contact me.

How this could work, I would setup a couple of sites one for development and one for testing so there would be a central place for the project where we could all add our input.

David 

Hi I'm a Drupal Developer and I just finished putting together a photo a day site (http://greatexistence.net/) in drupal.  Using taxonomy is an amazing way to organize photos with tags and categories.  Reach out to me with anything you need.

I'm using Joomla daily, and Drupal to a lesser extent. But for a metadata (keywords, title, description) searchable gallery, you'd better start from Coppermine as it is designed for that. Actually at the moment I'm coding a mod of Coppermine to have a multiuser gallery with direct sales links via Paypal, and without all the rating stuff of the generic Coppermine.

What made you think of Drupal? Even in Joomla it would be a lot of work. You can better bridge your gallery into it, timewise spoken.



Taxonomy yes, but your gallery isn't searchable by keywords/tags. I can understand why since you probably know Drupal inside out, but to have a tag-searchable gallery, you'd better start from Coppermine, or add modules to put tags in a db and make it searchable. That's a lot coding into a CMS like drupal or joomla. Iofoto uses Wordpress, but his galleries are not searchable: he just links to his agent sites.

Well a very valid reason for starting from Drupal is that you are a developer and you're at home in the code. I saw the implementation and it's very well done. It's just that no CMS I know of has searching on keywords, and coppermine (CPG) has. The taxonomy idea is OK for a limited number of images, but when the db gets bigger, tag-search might be more appealing to a viewer, since he doesn't have to walk through the categories sequentially. Your tags are just displayed for information purposes, not for searching, as I gathered.

What's mostly done is bridge CPG with a CMS to have the best of both worlds, since CPG doesn't have the functionality of a CMS. You might take a shortcut by injecting the IPTC tags into the Drupal search module and that would solve it basically too, since you're just using the existing db then. It's all a matter of what can be done the easiest way, given your knowledge of any platform like Drupal or Joomla.

Keyword-based search also allows to look for "similars". I have my programming playground set up with a very limited number of images and it doesn't work well, but you can have an idea by clicking here, then scroll down to "file information" till you see "Similar:". You then see a list of clickable keywords from the image. When clicking it, you'll get a page with all images that contain that keyword. For instance click "graffiti" and you will have a search results page with all images that contain the keyword "graffiti". For multiple keywords and AND/OR, also in title and description, you can rely on the standard CPG search module: click "search" button on the bottom left sidebar.

No need to waste your time installing CPG and testing. To have a rough idea, just have a quick look at my mod. I'm also working on a brand new "model" module in CPG (not ready yet) that will allow to search "More files of the same model". The model's name needs to be in the IPTC for that, easy to do with Irfanview.

Finally, I also plan to have licensing in place on every image. Check here and scroll down to "License this file" and see the buttons where the image can be licensed. It's done by putting the comma or newline separated URLs in an unused IPTC text field. The "Shopping cart" button doesn't work yet, since I have to study the Paypal API manual first.

I will probably bridge this gallery with the slightly modified Joomla installation on my main site, under the button 'Portfolio'.

Keep us posted here on MSG about your progress. I will do it too, and when the mod is ready, I will do the same with a link to the zipped CPG install. That can take a while since I still have to do a lot of stupid coding, like managing the new "models" db table. Right now, I poke them in by hand in the MySql.

The CMS/forum frameworks like Drupal,Joomla,Wordpress are not really meant to do image galleries that are dynamic and searchable by keywords. The best one of the galleries is imho Coppermine. If you don' have programming skills or time, consider this:

Lightboxphoto/ is a package that has all and you can install it on you own server, so no limits for space and bandwidth. It is 1000$ but imagining the price of your time it takes to program a working gallery with sales, it's a bargain.

Doing it with tables in HTML is very time consuming, it's not searchable, and of course it's not dynamic so you can't upload images, but you have to code every new image in. There is an excellent package around for generating the html painlessly and I've used it for years: Arles. Being HTML only, not needing a db like MySql, you can park it at most free hosts.

It is not.
Drupal is the prime choice for developers of non-photography websites. For the photographer not wanting or able to spend time on web-development, CMSaccount and Ktools are the prime choice.
Sure honey, I knew you were into charity.
If your "company" badly needs spam to get customers, I'd pass it.

I think there's a RM calculator as part of Ktools Photostore v3, but it will be MUCH more robust in v4, which should be nearing a beta phase of development. It's a complete rewrite of the product.