Zenphoto looks marvelous and came highly recommended by Marcel Gagne. Researching before installation, I have some questions, the answers to which I could not find on the zenphoto website, including documentation / user guides and viewing the excellent movies:

1. Is it possible to build photo albums locally and upload them to a host without installing zenphoto on the host? (I'm guessing no because of using mysql, etc. but don't want to assume so. Installation on a hosting service adds a considerable level of complexity for me - especially since I am in the research phase.

2. Can one move photos around within an album, using drag and drop to rearrange them?

3. Are there tools for adding tags / comments / descriptions to groups of photos? Is one require to open a dialog for each photo to edit comments / captions and the like?

Thanks in advance. I have > 8000 images and am looking for a high quality, easy to use photo management system.

/Roger

1. Zenphoto must be installed on the server hosting the album. It is server side scripts. You can install a local web server on your PC and run zenphoto locally from it. You would need apache and MySQL on the PC.

2. You can move albums and images around, but not via drag & drop. You can also arrange the albums and images in the folders you desire locally on your PC then FTP the whole structure to your gallery.

3. Editing can be done on the Admin back-end or on the album/image page directly. There is a comments page on the back-end where all your comments are managed. However, to edit comment text you will need to open an edit window.

Some additions to #2:
Not exactly. You can sort the images within a single album via drag and drop. Also you can sort albums on the same level (like the top level albums or the direct subalbums of a top level album) via drag and drop. But as sbillard says moving and copying is not possible via drag and drop.

If you have attached all data like title, descriptions etc. with exif to your images you can also work directly via ftp in your albums.

Maybe try a local install using WAMP or the like. This is far better than explaining I think.

Thank you, Messrs Billard and Crylian, for taking time to answer my basic questions.

Best regards,

/Roger