A MAJOR advantage of zenphoto over all the other gallery software I've tried is the filesystem model, in which album structure is mapped onto a directory tree (brilliant!). Another strength is the ability to pull user-generated (i.e. hand-typed!) metadata on title and description, etc. directly from photos themselves. This is ideal since these image-specific metadata can be generated and edited by many programs.
These constitute vital advantages over other packages, in that you get the advanced features and speed of a database, together with the simplicity and lack of lock-in of a plain directory tree.
Unfortunately there is no standard for album/directory metadata equivalent to EXIF/IPTC/XMP/etc. It would, however, be possible to overcome this limitation by using a tiny text file in each album (for import only). I believe it was mentioned 5 years ago, and at the time also developers believed the idea was good. Something as simple as:
.description:
`
Title: My Album Name
Description: This is my favorite album, as you can see...
`
would do it!
This would be a trivial metadata format to target, opening up the possibility for easier import and migration from many other gallery packages without any database magic. The mtime on these files could be checked in the same way other filesystem elements are at present to detect updates. Speaking as someone who has lost considerable metadata from database issues, it would also give users considerable peace of mind to have full control over both their binary media bytes and their metadata.
Thanks for a wonderful gallery package.
Zenphoto
Comments
http://www.zenphoto.org/documentation/plugins/_zp-extensions---xmpMetadata.php.html
Of course you need some tool/plugin for the gallery package to import from to generate such files. But you will need that for a simple text file as well.
Regarding loss of metadata the best is really to store them in the image itself then you don't loose them on db issues.
Also zenphoto provides the feature to backup the database (the zenphoto related tables of course) that you can even be done automatically. Backups are the most important and most forgotten task you have to do working with computers (as you surely know).
XMP field (per ExifTool) => ZenPhoto function:
description => description
headline => title
subject => keyword tags
One problem, however, is that metadata does not update; you must force an album metadata refresh for this to occur. It would be wonderful if the same algorithm that notices the database is out of sync w.r.t. the filesystem could be extended to XMP sidecar files. Is this expected?
Also, I learned from another post you now support backing up XMP data to sidecars, including the thumbnail. This is great! I haven't tried the development build, but noticed an apparent bug or two:
`
if (array_key_exists('thumbnail',$metadata)) {
$album->setThumb($metadata['thhumbnail']);
}
`
but the field is called 'thumb' above that (and thhumbnail has one h to many). I'm presently trying to create a custom XMP tag for thumbnail that the development zenphoto can read.
Thanks again.
Regarding the typo please open a ticket so my collegue later spots it.