phTagr is an opensource social photo web gallery some people would call it a flickr clone

  1. History
  2. Used 3rd Party Software
  3. About the Author

In short: To you can upload photos and video, tag them with date, tags, categories, location or even geo location. The photos and videos are sorted by their tags or other MetaData and you can search by them - also exclude it. User can write comments and could - according to the access setting of the media - download the original raw photos.

A bit longer: What IDv3 is for mp3, EXIF and IPTC is the same for photos files JPEG. They store additional information to the picture. And what iTunes (or your preferred music library) is for your audio collection - phTagr is for your photo collection.

Your audio collection makes no sense and no fun without proper tagging of artist, title, or album for each audio file - that's the same for phTagr! phTagr rocks if your photos are tagged well with their MetaData. So you can easily lookup your photos by tags and combine your selection with other MetaData until it fits your need. You can also exclude the MetaData! For example you select all photos with tag 'john', 'alice' but not 'mike' in the category 'vacation' within the year 2010. These selection could be shown in the build in slide show. Of cause you can edit all your photos easily by multi selection - or you can edit photo by photo.

And all in all phTagr is for multiple users. So not only you can show your photos to your friends - your friends could use your phTagr as well to show their photos to you. You can share the files between friends and there is no longer mess of missing photos of your last party. Everyone could upload their photos - everyone tags his pictures - you download the photos you like with the stored MetaData. You can exchange your opinion with comments or get updated via RSS.

Note: phTagr is a hobby project and is written only in my spare time - just for fun without any commercial interest. If you don't like phTagr - that's fine. But if you like phTagr, please tell the world about it or join our dev team (We are something below 2 - help of any kind is deeply appreciated).

History

The project www.phtagr.org started in the early 2006 as solution to organize my own photos through tags and categories - no file renaming schema was appropriate to fit all needs. Inspired by  flickr by tagging all photos and the ability to writing these information back to the photo itself through standardized meta blocks (EXIF and IPTC) the gallery phTagr was born ( flickr doesn't write all the tags back - it just reads them). So you can tag your photos, but with phtagr the MetaData is never lost somewhere in a database. Each photos contains its own part of the bigger picture of your order (e.g. Tag cloud).

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phTagr at the very very very early stage

So I learned the programming language PHP and some database abstraction at the beginning. A started to love PHP and was happy coding in my spare time.

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phTagr with its new green theme

Initially it should only run locally on my own LAMP - but soon the idea of a public photo web gallery was not too far and the ability of photo sharing was added! In late 2006 phtagr was used to share the pictures of a student play group. And since then it grows and grows and grows.

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phTagr's early home page

At the beginning I had no idea of size of this project and wrote every single function by my own. Of cause this started to become a mess! But luckily some PHP frameworks started their work, too. These help to develop fast and clean web applications without reinventing the wheel. I chose the model-view-control framework [www.cakephp.org cakePHP] and stared to rewriting the code of the gallery. phtagr 2.0 based on cakePHP was released in May 2008.

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The new phTagr based on the MVC framework  CakePHP

http://demo.phtagr.org/media/thumb/174

The improved home page of phTagr

You can see more screenshots at the  demo page.

Used 3rd Party Software

Following software is used/integrated with phTagr:

About the Author

I am 30 something, computer scientist and live and work in Germany. I like opensource projects and solutions and I am happy using Ubuntu, Firefox and Inkscape. Therefore, I would like to pay back something to the opensource community with this project.