Things are a bit slow at work so I’ve been messing with some of the scripts that the company offers easy installs for.  I’m increasingly disappointed with the ease of using Drupal. But Zenphoto is another matter. I played with it once a few months ago. I’ve always liked the clean look of it, but didn’t spend much time with it before due to the difficulty in just finding the admin login. My latest round with it has been much more promising.

First, for those having trouble the admin login is at http://domain.com/zenphoto/zp-core/ where domain.com is your domain, and zenphoto is changed to the folder you did the install on. In my case it’s http://prettyprettylights.com/art/zp-core/.

After login in the first thing we want to do is add some pictures. so we click on the upload tab. If we have an existing album we select it from the “Upload to” drop-down. If we don’t, then we type a new abum name in the field. Now for the best part. Click the box below it that says “Select Files.” Navigate to the folder with your pictures and select as many as you want. I’m sure there’s an upload limit either imposed by your php.ini, your hosting company, maybe even Zenphoto itself, but that’s not mentioned and I happily uploaded four photos at once.

Once the upload completed I was taken to a screen where I could scroll through and adjust the display settings. I can add descriptions, custom data, adjust the thumbnail size, adjust the part of the thumbnail that displays, all from a fairly easy, intuitive interface.

One thing I wasn’t liking was the multiple gallery setup. This is a little funny because I would love this sort of feature in just about any other Script, from blogging to CMS systems. But for Zenphoto I was at first content with the idea of doing a new install for every gallery I wanted. Then I came to my senses. It’s a great feature that just needs a little know-how, aka, friendly URLs. A little googling revealed that it was possible, but the documentation was a bit outdated and I hit a few road-blocks.

So, to get Friendly URLs working on Zenphoto 1.2.5:

• Go to the folder where you did the install on your web host.
• Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess.
• Open .htaccess so that you can make changes.
• Find the line that says “#### !!! Change this to the web path (eg: http://www.yourwebsite.com/photos –> /photos) !!!”
• Below that change it to the folder where you did the install, include a / at the beginning (ex. /art)
• Save the changes.
• Log into your Zenphoto admin area.
• Click on the Options Tab.
• Click on General.
• In URL Options check mod_rewrite.
• Test. Hopefully you won’t get a 404 error.

Since this discovery I may move this to a more generic images folder and see about using includes to plant the albums I want directly into my website where I want them. Part of the Zenphoto appeal is the clean interface on the default theme which should allow it to fit nicely into any standard theme. Maybe a few tweaks to the CSS to make fonts and margins a bit smaller. We’ll have to see how well that works out.