PennAve - a dynamic gallery for F-Spot

[Patrick Wagstrom <wagspat iit edu>]

Hi Folks,

Over the last few weeks I managed to hack together what I believe is a
pretty nifty new gallery script for F-Spot, which I call PennAve.
Instead of just presenting a static HTML export from F-Spot, PennAve
allows visitors to browse tags and stack tags together.  A wonderful way
to sort photos.  Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), it's not
written in C#, rather it's a Python application that one runs on their
web server.  Instead of needing a separate database, it directly
utilizes the photos.db file from F-Spot to provide all the tag and photo
information.  For my system, it's as simple as just using an rsync
script to update my archive of photos on my server and copy over the new
photos.db.

The main screen presents a list of all the tags in the database scaled
by the number of photos with that tag.  Clicking on tag brings up only
photos with those tags.  Clicking on more tags results in a logical
"and" operation.  In my brief user testing with some folks at my church,
they were really impressed at how easy it was to find specific photos
from an event just by browsing the tags.  I consider that a success.
Heck, my Dad even figured it out quickly after I was able to communicate
how to type a URL directly into IE.

It's designed to be extensible - the entire user interface is written in
XSLT and CSS -- so if you hate python, you don't need to touch it.  On
the other hand, you need to hack some XSLT to change the user interface.
The XSLT translation is done client side, so you'll need a newer browser
such as Firefox (IE worked until recently, something I did broke it
though).

Anyway, I figured that maybe some other people might find it
interesting.  You can find the home page for project - which I started
two years ago, but decided to completely rewrite it and just use the
same name, at http://pennave.sf.net/   If you're impatient and would
just like to see a demo gallery of what the software can do, check out
the demo gallery at http://patrick.wagstrom.net/gallery/  (go easy on it
to get the feel, it's a cable modem)

Anyway feedback is appreciated.  I don't anticipate every trying to get
this as an official part of F-Spot, but I'm hoping that it might fill a
need for some other people.

Thanks!

Patrick Wagstrom