Minishowcase Mod

I find most Internet photo galleries very annoying with their inability to quickly browse and scan through photos. The closest I’ve come to a good web-based photo gallery is Picasaweb, but unfortunately you can’t install it on your own custom webserver. A good alternative is Minishowcase, which is a light, slightly buggy, but very good Web 2.0 AJAX photo gallery. The down side is it didn’t support videos, subdirectories, or comments embedded in the IPTC field of JPEGs (which is where Picasa stores comments about each photo). Since it’s all open source with PHP and I’m a fair hand at basic web development stuff, I decided to quickly hack these features into it.

Download Minishowcase with my modification (800 KB).

Features

• Movies: You can now add and view videos in the form of FLVs (use SUPER or ffmpeg to convert your videos) just like you can normal photos.
• Sub-directories: For basic sorting, you can organize your photos into sub-directories and each sub-directory will show up as a separate item (i.e. /galleries/Traveling/Europe_2008/Rome). It is a bit cumbersome because they all appear and there is no heiarchical expand/collapse like there is in say Windows Explorer, but it’s better than nothing. There have been some other mods at the Minishowcase community that have better looking sub-directory features, but I pride mine as being the first 😉
• IPTC Captions: Picasa stores captions to photos in the IPTC section of the JPEG and minishowcase will now alternatively read from this instead of a separate text file so you can export photos from Picasa and have your captions show up just like normal in Minishowcase. Using some tools, I hear you can have iPhoto do the same thing.

See Instructions.html in the download for more information or contact me if you have problems. I’m busy but I’ll try to make time if I can.