R.I.G.  

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Description

Summary RIG is a web-based JPEG and movie album viewer, especially useful for digital camera albums; provides automatic image resizing, preview & thumbnail caching, user authentication; composed of a PHP web interface and a C++ thumbnail engine. Storage relies on file-system rather than database. RIG has been primarily prototyped in the soothing environment of Pennsylvania ;-)

What is RIG?

RIG (a.k.a. the Ralf Image Gallery) is a web-based image album viewer.
The main application of RIG is a viewer for digital camera albums; as such it offers specific functionalities like automatic image resizing and handling of dated album names.

RIG is composed of two parts:

• A set of PHP scripts allowing a user to navigate albums and display images via a web interface,
• A C++ "thumbnail" engine that can resize images "on the fly". It is used to produce thumbnails as well as resize images to the viewer's preference.

The images are read directly from the local file system. The directories are interpreted as albums, each album containing an arbitrary number of images or sub-albums. Currently only JPEG files are supported as this is the most common format produced by digital cameras. Most modern cameras can also generate movie files: under GNU/Linux systems, these movie files can be handled if avifile library is installed on the system.

RIG currently works using PHP 4 with Apache. It is mainly developed under GNU/Linux (Debian/Apache 1.3/PHP 4) but also tested under Win32/Apache/PHP 4 or Win32/IIS 5/PHP 4. It is expected that the scripts will work with other web servers supporting PHP or at least require only a minimal set of modifications.

RIG thumbnail, the resizing application, is a C++ application that compiles with GCC (for GNU/Linux) or Visual Studio 6 (Win32) or Visual Studio .Net (Win32). It is expected to be portable on other platforms using a reasonable C++-compatible compiler. The thumbnail application has been designed with speed in mind yet code maintenance has not been sacrificed for speed. 1600x1200 images are resized in less than 1 second on a not-so-high end Pentium III @ 1Ghz computer (usually in less time than is needed for the resulting image to be downloaded by the client web browser) or in 2~3 seconds on a K6-II @ 350 MHz (i.e. a low end DSL server).

RIG maintains a cache of resized images and a cache of generated HTML album pages in order to produce them once. The web interface provides an administration page that can be used to pre-compute all the resized images. The administrator can also hide/show images or albums at will.

The web interface is composed of a small set of HTML and PHP modular scripts, which are expected to be easy to understand and modify even for a beginner or a non-programmer. All UI strings (for the web interface) are isolated for internationalization purposes; default translations in English, French, Spanish and Japanese are provided. Configuration files provide support for site-wide settings vs. album-wide settings. It is thus possible to have different albums (with different configuration files) served by the same server yet sharing the same PHP code base.

Features

In 2000, I wanted to update the photo album on my web site. I was previously using statically generated web pages with one reduced version of the pictures. I looked around and quickly found IDS first and Gallery later but they didn't exactly do what I wanted. IDS was really really slow on my server and Gallery doesn't just use the plain file system structure with a local network upload of albums, which is a requirement for me.

So here's a quick review of RIG's features:

• File system based:
  • Albums are stored in plain directories and image files.
  • Name of albums and images are directly based on the file names.
  • The hierarchical structure of the directories defines the hierarchical structure of the albums.
  • Display ordering is based on a date prefix in album or images, as well as an index prefix in image names.
  • The easiest way to manage the content of your albums is by managing directories of pictures and transferring to your server via the network (Samba, NFS, FTP, SFTP, etc.) using your regular GNU/Linux or Windows tools.
• Not database driven:
  • Believe it or not, this is actually a good feature. Don't get me wrong: database storage of metadata is a good thing, but it is not always necessary.
  • RIG does not require any database to work and it will never do. All user-editable settings are stored in flat text files.
  • Backuping and mirroring a site is just a matter of handling folders of images and text files.
  • I have plans to implement future features that will benefit of the presence of a database (pear or dbm). These features will most probably be disabled by default if no database is present, unless they can be implemented using text or XML files with reasonable performances.
• Security:
  • RIG is built with security in mind. This can take many forms:
  • Settings:
    • The default installation allows album settings and sources to be stored in a specific location out of the htdocs/document root. This is particularly important for security-sensitive files such as users & passwords.
  • Web interface:
    • All HTTP GET arguments are checked for sanity. Relative paths in album or image names are forbidden.
    • Buffer overflows and cross-site scripting issues are taken care of.
    • Form input is filtered and validated. HTML or PHP scripting is limited or not allowed in form inputs.
    • User authentication supports plain-text, crypt or MD5 passwords. Client-side cookies do not store clear passwords if crypt or MD5 is used.
  • Folders:
    • RIG uses special folders for upload. Uploaded images are not stored in album directories transferred manually by the user.
    • RIG will never touch the manually transferred images by default. Features to rename/move folders will be implemented either by using a virtual remapping or by physical remapping if the site admin enables it. Site administrators can change this behavior on a per-album basis.
• Speed:
  • The web interface is written in pure PHP4 and executes reasonably fast.
  • The "thumbnail" resize engine is a simplistic C++ application based on libjeg62b and libavifile. The resize algorithm uses floating point arithmetic and has been tuned to achieve good performances yet keeping the code simple and readable (prior to that I was using a fixed-point arithmetic algorithm which was not that much faster, had visible artifacts when producing small thumbnails and was basically impossible to maintain). Aggressive optimization is no longer the only way to go.
  • Timing: resizing a 1600x1200 JPEG takes approximately 2~4 seconds on a K6@350, 1 second on a G3@350 and 0.5 seconds on a P4@1GHz.
  • RIG keeps a cache of the generated previews or thumbnails. The above generation time only occurs once per picture per preview size.
  • RIG maintains a cache of the generated album HTML pages. Successive requests of the same album or image page reuses the HTML cache, avoiding most of the PHP calls. A cached page is generally served in a fraction of a second, which means better response time and reduced server load. The cache is automatically regenerated when needed.
• Flexibility:
  • Site vs Album settings: by design, RIG can handle multiple independent albums on the "site" server. The common source code is shared. Preferences settings can be overridden by each separate albums. This allows the site settings to be managed by the admin and albums to be managed by each user account.
  • The web interface can easily support multiple languages and multiple layout/color themes. English, Spanish, French and Japanese are currently supported.
  • The theme architecture will be enhanced soon to be able to have richer themes, more CSS compliant.
• Portability:
  • The web interface is developed mostly under GNU/Linux/Apache and tested against Windows/Apache or Windows/IIS.
  • The C++ thumbnail engine compiles with GCC 2.95, 3.x, Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio .Net.
• Non-obsolescense:
  • RIG is still quite young. I have many ideas in mind which I haven't examined yet. I write RIG mostly for myself and some friends, which means it will continue to evolve, one idea or one feature at a time.
  • Between features I actually need and features which are too hype to miss, I don't see the project ending any time soon and that's just fine with me.
  • The best way to make sure development goes on is by using it and telling me about it. Comments (both negative and positive) are always welcome.

This list may be incomplete. RIG permanently evolves.

If you want information about the future of RIG, you can:

• Consult the RIG development page, which list things I'm thinking about and may or may not implement.
• Consult the RIG todo list for a non-exhaustive list of features I'm working on.
• Simply email me and ask!

What is the RIG License?

RIG 0.6.2 used to have a modified version of the Artistic License.
Since RIG 0.6.3+, the license has been reverted to the pure Artistic License to be an Open Source license. *grin*

You can consult the license here: RIG License.

I am not a lawyer and I find licenses generally obscure to read, so what it all means is:

• RIG is free software, it can be used for either personal, academic or commercial purposes at absolutely no cost.
• It comes "as-is". No guarantee, support, maintenance or installation help is implied.
• You are free to add any feature that you think is missing, or changing the source code or the look to match your own needs. I'm interested in learning about any feature you add, I make no promise I'd actually reuse your code. If you redistribute your own version, please use the same license and make it easy to differentiate your sources from mine.
• I love positive feedback and positive criticism. I already have an extended todo list of things I'd like to see in the software at some point; of course there is no written schedule for this, it all depends on my free time and my creativity. If you need something that is not on this list, please ask gently.
• If you'd like to, I'd be more than happy to add your site to the sample site list below.
• Your respect will earn you mine.

Starting with version 0.7, RIG is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

News

Sample Sites

Here are some sample image galleries:

Album: Ralf's Public Image Gallery Owner: Ralf Version: N/A System: N/A Status: Not Operational. Closed.

If you want to have your own RIG-based image gallery listed here, please drop me an email.

SourceForge

RIG Image Gallery on SourceForge, code name rig-thumbnail: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rig-thumbnail/

Downloads

Stable | Testing/Unstable | Old Archives

Contact

RIG is developed and maintained by