Coppermine, being a photo gallery or infact a media gallery, as it can serve much more than just images, faces a daunting task of transfering a lot of data to browser with every single request. This is not just bandwidth eater but sometimes also frustrating to users when they have to keep waiting for the complete page to be loaded.
To speedup the page loading without putting much pressure on the server, we can use some proven techniques. This post will discuss the htaccess way to better the page loading by caching and compressing the page contents wherever possible. Continue reading ‘Speeding up Coppermine with htaccess’
After months (I must say years) of hard work and adding numerous new features Coppermine Dev Team is pleased to announce the release of an alpha version of our next major series 1.5.x. The alpha release is only meant for testers. This release is in no way meant for production use and should only be used on your testbeds.
If you want to help us by testing cpg 1.5.1 then please read our forum thread, cpg1.5.1 alpha: how to become a tester, to figure out if you can apply for tester group membership.
There is absolutely no support for cpg1.5.x at this stage and no support requests will be entertained in the forums. However testers are encouraged to report bugs in the forums (1.5.x bugs board is restricted to testers and developers only).
Non-testers i.e. normal users of coppermine – stay tuned and look forward for a wonderful package coming up in the next few months.
One of the most common task I perform before uploading photos in my coppermine gallery is resizing all pictures to a more internet friendly size.
Over the period of time I have found ImageMagick to be very useful when it comes to manipulating images. Below are the commands commonly used for resizing images.
To resize all images in current directory to 800 width (height will be reduced proportionately) :
mogrify -resize 800 *.jpg
Resize all images to 800 height (width will be reduced proportionately)
mogrify -resize x800 *.jpg
Resize all images to a maximum dimension of 800×800. This means that max of width and height will be considered while resizing :
mogrify -resize 800×800 *.jpg
Reduce the size of images to the percent of original :
mogrify -resize 75% *.jpg
Note that in all above commands the original file will be replaced with the new one. Also the examples given above uses only jpg files but you can surely do it with other image formats as well.
Many moons ago I decided to set up a website. I had never ventured into the wonderful world that is web design before and was very wet behind the ears. I am a network support guy (read geek) and have some programming experience but that doesn’t help in the slightest when it comes to web design.
One of the first things I wanted to do was to build up a big collection of windsurfing pictures so spent ages trying various softwares to do this. Some were offline packages that create the album for you to upload, these were quickly ruled out as I wanted my users to be able to upload. Then there were the packages my web host at the time offered, all next to useless. Finally and by a bit of luck I came across Coppermine. It really floated my boat and had all the features I wanted then some. Continue reading ‘CPG and Me’
Its a great pleasure to inform you all that we have moved our site and all subdomains to a dedicated server sponsored and hosted by Bytemark. The transfer was smooth without any outages and our ever busy forum was up all the time.
You will find the forum pages loading faster than earlier as the new server has more resources which we couldn’t manage on our old shared hosting environment. However, we are highly obliged for the services provided by our old host Power-Netz for the past numerous years.
We would like to thank Matthew Bloch and his team from Bytemark for their generous offer and services. We look forward to a wonder webhosting experience.
I came across with this quote today and instantly thought of coppermine forums.
Never argue with an idiot. They pull you down to their level, then beat you with experience.
There is no dearth of such morons on coppermine forums.
Recently I have seen many users criticizing support team of being rude and un-friendly. They claim that we should answer their each and every question (which we do unless the question has already been asked many times) as they are using our product. What they don’t understand is that coppermine is not a commercial product but a FREE open source application which comes with no warranty for support. Despite of this we try to help as much as possible and reply to more than 95% of threads.
Threads started by such morons lead to flames and arguments and they generally beat us with their experience.
Continuing the series to highlight the new exciting features of cpg15x, today lets take a look at all new upload interface. The new interface uses the popular open source tool SwfUpload which uses flash to upload files. The great thing about this tool is that it shows file upload progress bar. Whats better than a demo itself, so here you go…
As you can see multiple files can be selected and uploaded in one single go. After uploading the user is taken to editpics page where s/he can enter the file details like title, description and keywords. The only gotcha with this new interface is that it requires flash and javascript but in todays time if your browser don’t have those two things then you are still living in 20th century 
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Well i am late on this but nevertheless – Coppermine Dev Team wishes all users of cpg a very Happy New Year 2009. We look forward to having a rocking time in 2009.
This new year will also bring the new coppermine release i.e. cpg1.5.x (lets keep our fingers crossed). We are working hard to make this possible. However no release date has been set so please don’t ask about the date in comments. You all have kept enough patience and as the saying goes “Patience is the virtue of wise men” fits quite well here.
Fasten your seat belts and get ready for a rocking year ahead.
. Let me see whom we can follow. You are definitely in the list