7:18 PM
Paul B
My wife is an amateur photographer. She has been aspiring to go pro, and perhaps start making a little money on the side. She frequently has people asking her to take their family photos, wedding pictures, baby pictures, school pictures etc. Most of the time, she does this as a favor to friends and family, but eventually she wants to branch out.
One of the things she said she wanted to get her foot in the door, and to provide potential clients with samples of her work was an online photo gallery. I decided i would put my skills of finding cool free software to use, and decided to look into an Open Source solution for her!
What I found was a little PHP based photo gallery that ties to a MySQL back end. What’s that smell? Smells like an Ubuntu LAMP server! Well, in my case I went with a free hosting service that I wrote about a few months ago called 000webhost. Anyhoo, that is neither here nor there.
The free gallery is called Coppermine, and setup is a snap! Just create your MySQL database, username, password etc, then upload the Coppermine files to your web server. Then you browse to your website’s URL and follow the installation wizard. It really can’t be any simpler.
I plan in the future to do a number of video segments showing users how easy it is to setup some of these free PHP sites, and I plan on using Coppermine as an example.
Here is the URL to the site I setup for my wife (http://momentsbefore.com). It is still under construction, and she hasn’t uploaded any photos yet. There is one picture, but that is only because I uploaded it to show my wife how easy it is to use.
Speaking of my wife’s photography, here are some samples of her work:
Like many other free PHP CMS/website scripts out there, there are lots of free Coppermine templates available so you can put some customizing touches on your gallery. Just do a Google search for Free Coppermine Themes.
Do any of you out there dabble in photography? Do you use Coppermine? Do you use something else? If so, post your photo gallery URL’s in the comments!
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