Is ZenPhoto The Right Choice?

We are using ZenPhoto for our photo library and I’m beginning to wonder if it’s the best choice.  I really like the option of being able to upload via FTP and the pictures/albums are automatically added to the database.  That is a really nice feature for managing large albums and libraries.  The only real issue that I’m having is with the sorting and general navigation of the site.

With the technical issues that we were having, I had to recreate the ZenPhoto installation for our personal photos.  Our new installation is located on a subdomain and that seems to be working fine.  I tried to have the albums sorted manually to ensure that the newest pictures were shown first.  That was fine when there were only two years worth of albums; however, once I got all of the albums uploaded, this was impossible to do through the drag-and-drop admin interface on the backend.

With this number of albums, the page normally stops loading due to timeouts, so we are never able to display all of the albums, let alone organize them through drag-and-drop.  So, what I then did was have it sorted by album name (in descending order) – so as long as I keep the album names as they are (Year_Month), all sorts will be fine and the newest albums will be displayed first.

The only problem with that is that it looks rather clunky.  I could keep the initial portion of the album name that and change the label following it, or I can just update the descriptions to be more precise.

Overall, I have not had any problems with this installation displaying any of the pictures and working with any of our Flash Video out of the box.  This is probably the biggest plus to the software in that we haven’t had to do anything unusual to get everything to display out of the box.

The one option I would love is to be able to rotate the pictures up on the site.  Kathy has a habit of taking pictures with the camera at different angles.  Up to this point, I have had to ensure that the picture was rotated prior to uploading.  Again, this isn’t a big deal, but it would be nice if I could just upload them all and take care of that on the server when I’m adding my labels and text.

Another step that I have to perform is making the pictures smaller prior to uploading.  I’m using ImgaRes software to batch-reduce the pictures and make them manageable prior to uploading.  This ensures that the server doesn’t get over-burdened of trying to thumbnail all of these huge pictures.

Here is my current process:

• We save all of our pictures to monthly folders on any machine in the house.
• At the end of each month, I synch (contributory synch) each photo directory with the server.
• I convert all camera video from AVI to FLV using the Flash encoder and place the Flash video in the “To Upload” folder.
• I convert all monthly pictures using ImgaRes to 25% and have them stored in the “To Upload” folder tree.
• I upload all converted video and images to the ZenPhoto albums folder via FTP.
• After an hour or so, I log into ZenPhoto to add text and labels to the images.

It would be really nice if many of these steps were automated by software (as they probably could be).  I think Picasa does something like this with PicasaWeb (although not the video part).  That would be something that I could look to developing for myself.  Even if it were just scripted, that would be helpful.

I guess ZenPhoto is the right choice, since it seems to work and I’m not willing to commit the time to try to find an alternative.