Download: imgutil-1.0.tar.gz
View: README.imgutil

The Imgutil package is my idea of a good "Digital Workflow" solution for digital camera users who store their images on a Linux workstation and need an easy way to make their images available over the web via the Apache web server. It is optimized to work with Canon digital cameras (in particular the Canon EOS D30), but will support other cameras with little or no effort.

Imgutil has the following advantages over other workflow tools:

• Linux Support. This was very important to me because I do about 90% of my work using Linux. However the Imgutil package can be ported to any system that supports Apache, PHP, Perl, and the ImageMagick Toolkit. This includes nearly all versions of Unix as well as Windows and Mac OS X.

• Web Enabled. The Imgutil package implements all the essential features of other web-based solutions like the Exhibit Engine or the software that runs the pbase.com site. This is done using a very small amount of code, and it's easy to set up and add new image directories. Most importantly, there is no static HTML to maintain. It's all handled by a few hundred lines of PHP code.

• Easy Administration. If you already have Apache with PHP up and running, you can set this up in just a few minutes. The main way Imgutil differs from many of the other web-based image browsing applications is that there is no database to maintain. All you do is set up a simple directory structure, then run one script to do everything else. All information is stored in plain text files. This advantage of doing it this way is that it will scale up as far as you need it to, and it works well with any backup strategy.

• EXIF Support. EXIF is a fancy name for the data that all digital cameras store inside their image files. The Imgutil script extracts this data and stores it in text files for easy browsing. I do this by calling the jhead utility (I'm still working on an EXIF parser written in 100% Perl and plan to include it in a future version.)

For more information, please check out the README.imgutil file that comes with the package.