Backing up photos with the Raspberry Pi (Part 2)

Image Gallery

Once your images are backed up, you may well want to see them on a larger screen than the one on your digital camera or smartphone. There are also a number of online photo galleries with sophisticated interfaces and their own databases, but these are overkill for a simple image bank.

We recommend using a simple photo gallery such as Photo Archive [2] (Figure 2). If you need more features, for example, because you want to access your pictures remotely, try PicApport [3] or phTagr [4].

Figure 2: The basic "Photo Archive" gallery does the job.

PicApport is available free of charge. It's written in Java and can even run as a server, but it's closed source. Nevertheless, it has a very good interface and works well with mobile devices. phTagr on the other hand is open source, describing itself as a "Flickr clone". It allows you to tag images and has several other features over and above PicApport.

Server Installation

There are several web server programs such as Apache, Nginx and Lighttpd ("Lighty"). As the name suggests, Lighttpd requires very little resources and so is well-suited for the Raspberry Pi. Besides Lighttpd, you'll need to install PHP as well as the PHP web application itself. Just as with Samba, there's a script on the GitHub project page located in the tools directory named install-web. The script will download the necessary packages from the Raspbian repository, decompress the photo gallery (the archive must be located in the same directory), and update the necessary file links.

After the installation you can access the web gallery by opening your browser and going to the IP address of your Pi (Figure 3). The new backup script generates image thumbnails as it runs, so you should have no issues with slow performance or file permissions. Technically, "Photo Archive" could do this for you, but it would take a long time to process the data initially and the web server would need additional file permissions to save the thumbnails.

Figure 3: Thumbnails are automatically generated during the backup process.

The author has stripped down the original "Photo Archive" code. Specifically, the Image Bank program now loads all necessary components locally from the Raspberry Pi and displays directories in reverse order. There are also a number of useful tools alongside the program itself on the server; for instance, you can view the current system status by selecting the menu item System.

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