Displaying Photographs

Displaying Photographs

by Chemical Moose -
Number of replies: 19

I have a social forum and would like to load up a series of photos, display some thumbs and have my students view the pics of their choice.

I was going to upload the files with a pic and a thumb, paste the thumbs in a doc and then individually hyperlink to the pic file. Seems cumbersome, is there an easier way to do this?

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In reply to Chemical Moose

Re: Displaying Photographs

by Jason Hando -
Haven't done this myself in Moodle but what you could do is use a third party photo gallery program to make a html page of clickable thumbnails and then ftp resulting folder to server. Then all you have to do is create a web link resource in moodle that links to the index.html file within the folder.

Mac OSX you could use freeware called PhotoPage:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/3447

Windows you could use shareware called AlbumWeb:

http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/22045
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In reply to Chemical Moose

Re: Displaying Photographs

by Helen Foster -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Hi,

You may wish to consider Mike Churchward's fabulous glossary Photo Gallery Format. smile
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In reply to Chemical Moose

Re: Displaying Photographs

by Chemical Moose -

Jason, Helen and Marc - thank you all for your prompt replies.

I just wish that I could understand Helen's suggestion, but will have our IT people comment Monday. I have trialled both AlbumWeb and ThumbHTML and generated the finished product to different Moodle class sites, both have merit.

Any further comment would be graciously accepted.

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In reply to Chemical Moose

Re: Displaying Photographs

by warmac - -
I use jalbum it works very well and you would add it as a resource (link to web)

just add the folder i use (photos) to the moddle dir and enter the URL into the resource works great

http://jalbum.net/
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In reply to Chemical Moose

Re: Displaying Photographs

by Jason Hando -
Hi Chemical (your parents must have had a wicked sense of humour!),

Perhaps I could explain a little further what Helen suggested you try......

Sometimes programmers will take something in Moodle and add a feature and then share it with everyone. This was done by Mike Churchwood by modifying the glossary module in Moodle which allowed the upload and thumbnail display of images instead of the more traditional text definitions with the occasional inline graphic. (eg. Moodle glossary of common terms).

This new feature takes the form of a folder called "Gallery" which contains:

edit.html
gallery_format.php
README.TXT

It can be downloaded from the CVS, which is an online collaboration system to allow multiple programmers to work on one project, uploading code changes and allowing users to get updates.

The section of CVS @ sourceforge that has the gallery folder is contrib. I think this is where non-core development goes??

Once downloaded you simply place the whole folder inside moodle/mod/glossary/formats on your server.

It acts like another format of glossary, just like there is simple dictionary and encyclopedia formats. You must add the original graphic as an attachment to a new entry.

To make it work you add a glossary to a course as you normally would and choose "displayformatgallery", see pic below:


Attachment gallery.jpg
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In reply to Chemical Moose

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by Miles Berry -
I have a slightly different problem...
We have c. 15000 digital photos on our school server to which I'd like to provide some web-based access (at present they are in a samba share).
The obvious solution is Coppermine (http://coppermine.sourceforge.net/), but I'd like to use, at the very least, Moodle log-ins and passwords to restrict access to these pictures, or better yet have some smoother look/feel preserving integration into Moodle.
A quick search through forums here suggested that others had investigated this - I wonder if anyone has had success. There was also talk of a fabled 'data module' - will this do what I'm after?
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In reply to Miles Berry

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by Drew Buddie -

Miles,

How does Coppermine (thanks for telling us about it) compare with Flickr?  Are they 2 different beasts?  Does one do something the other doesn't?  I ask as what you describe is an area of interest for me too at the moment.

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In reply to Drew Buddie

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by Miles Berry -
Coppermine is opensource, you run it on your own webserver.
Flickr is a website which hosts lots of photoalbums and provides tools for sharing them. Flickr's owned by Yahoo. Also from the T&Cs:
1. You must be 13 years and older to use this site
...
6. Flickr is intended for personal use and is not a generic image hosting service. Professional or corporate uses of Flickr are prohibited.
...
Whilst I've not heard any complaints about Flickr's security, I'd hesitate before uploading my pupils' pictures there, furthermore the size and number of files involved would make this rather unappealing.
That said, I'm having trouble getting Coppermine to cope with the large file sizes we have anyhow!

Another possibility is Martin's own photoframe script, which I believe someone has ported as a Moole module, although that was back in the days of 1.4.

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In reply to Miles Berry

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by Jan Dierckx -
Here is Martin's PhotoFrame ported to Moodle.
It works in Moodle 1.5 but still has a lot of bugs. I think Mike's photoformat for the glossary is definitely the way to go.

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In reply to Jan Dierckx

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by dovix :) -
Hi, can you please direct me to the adapted code? I'd like to use this as well with Moodle.

by the way, I made a hack to the original code to make it work with right to left languages (Hebrew, Arabic...) which is available from here:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=25506
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In reply to Jan Dierckx

Re: PhotoFrame ported to Moodle

by Tom Murdock -
Hi Jan,
When I backup a course that uses this module, I get a CVS error during the restore.

I think I have apostrophe's in the titles of the pics. Any ideas how I can get this course to restore?

Thanks!
Tom
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In reply to Tom Murdock

Re: PhotoFrame ported to Moodle

by Jan Dierckx -
Hi Tom,
Sorry about that. I hadn't noticed this because I never tried making a backup of photoframe. Because of lack of space we are publishing all school pictures on a cheaper webspace: no php which means no PhotoFrame anymore.
But I did some experimenting with a local test installation. The gallery module doesn't have any backup / restore code. When I do a course backup it doesn't show up in the list of modules ready for backup. It seems the directory with the pictures and the directory with the automatically created thumbs are backed up because they reside inside the course files directory. The pics with apostrophes in the title were safely restored. Just to make sure we are talking about the same thing: with the title of the pic do you mean
a) the caption of the pic. When you rename the caption of dsc345.jpg a textfile is created with the name dsc345.cap Inside the real caption is stored.
b) the name of the pic itself. dsc345.jpg is renamed to Dog.jpg. This could cause problems because the zip module doesn't expect apostrophes in filenames.
Tom, can you check which method you use to change captions? Are there filenames with odd characters in them?

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In reply to Miles Berry

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by Helen Foster -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators
Miles, re. large file sizes and Coppermine, we use a Photoshop scripting plug-in and script to automate the process of file size reduction before uploading to Coppermine. If you'd like to try the script, please let me know.

Re. displaying photographs in Moodle in the future, AFAIK the Database module will be the answer. smile
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In reply to Helen Foster

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by Miles Berry -
Thanks Helen,
I figured out the problem with Coppermine - I needed to increase the memory_limit in my php.ini file.

Having installed imagemagick in case it was the gd libraries that were causing the problem, I discovered a rather nice shell command to get imagemagick to resize/reduce the jpeg quality/whatever of a whole directory:
find . -iname "*.jpg" | xargs -l -i convert -quality 75 {} /tmp/output/{}

Now I have it working, I'm inclined to persevere with Coppermine for my pictures, although I'd still be interested in password integration with Moodle - how do you get round this yourselves?


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In reply to Miles Berry

Re: Displaying Photographs - Coppermine

by Andy Hawkins -

For those without imagemagick or photoshop - Irfanview allows batch processing of images - not just jpg compression, but a a whole load of changes including rotation etc.

It is also a useful image editor for individual images.

Irfanview is a free download (for personal, non commercial, educational and charity use)

Andy

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