I’ve mentioned before that I’m using Coppermine to manage the photos on my website. I was happy with it at first, but recently I’ve been finding it to be limiting and poorly written. The most frustrating aspect is that the UI and the application logic are not separated – I’ve had to hack the code all over the place to make simple design changes, which means it’ll be impossible for me to upgrade to a future version (at least, not without doing my hacks all over again). Another annoyance is that the only way to re-order photos in an album is to rename them: the order is determined alphabetically by filename. That’s…really lame.

Something I’ve been looking for, but haven’t found in any photo management software, is the separation of “slideshows” from “albums.” To me, an album is used to thematically organize photos, while a slideshow can be used for a one-off presentation of photos that might come from more than one album. I’d also like to be able to put pictures in more than one album. For example, Baby X will get his own photo album, just like Kai, but I’m sure we’ll have pictures of the two of them together that I’d like to make available in both albums. Lastly, I really like the “random photo” that I’ve got on the blog, but I have no ability to exclude photos from appearing in the random display, which is something I’d like to be able to do.

So I’ve started work on my own photo management software. My approach is a completely OO design. This allows me to rationalize the effort as an opportunity to start learning the new objects implementation in PHP 5, since we’re still using PHP 4 at my job. I don’t have a lot of time to work on it though, so we’ll see how far I get with it.