Alternative to Picasa Email dropbox
The problem:
Spending money on extra capacity with Google (for use with Picasa) and, at the same time spending a few bucks a month on web hosting with Hostgator. There was plenty of spare place for all my photos as well as quite a bit more. I also decided that it would be good to have FTP access to upload/download new photos as opposed to being tied to Picasa.
This aside though I do quite like the functionality that Picasa gives me like an email drop box, given that this makes it really easy to upload photos from my phone or make a public gallery for a youth camp that participants can all email their photos to. Basically what I am after is a solution that will let me make use of my existing web hosting to have a PHP powered method to upload photos.
Software Used
Zenphoto (though this should work with any gallery software which will autorefresh albums based on the content of directories, many which allow FTP uploads will do this in some way)
WordPress Plugins:
The Process:
Anyway after searching around and trying out a few different galleries, I settled with Zenphoto. It had a clean interface, did everything that I was after without being excessively complicated. The only thing it didn’t do was accept uploads via email. Gallery 2 did claim to do this through the use of a community built plugin and upon installing this and testing it out I could not get it to work and it has not been updated in over two years. It seemed that few other galleries offered the feature of an email dropbox either so I decided to pick a gallery platform that I liked and then gain the dropbox functionality through another program.
I had used WordPress before and also made use of it’s ability to accept posts via email. By default WordPress does not handle attachments in posts via email but a plugin called Postie greatly expands this functionality to give the desired functionality with images. (and movies too) WordPress also allows you to change the folder in which it’s uploads are stored so I now had all the pieces of functionality that I required and it was just a matter of putting them all together.
Before we get into this I will admit that this is not the most efficient way to go about a getting the functionality of a dropbox. The thing is that I believe that the benefits of using a polished, flexible and regularly updated piece of software and plugins, as found in WordPress is well worth it, especially considering how trivially easy it is to set these all up. (no code hacking required at all)
Anyway, now for the process.
Firstly you will want to create an email account that you will use for your dropbox. You will want to pick an email address which is fairly random and that will not be published to avoid getting your dropbox spammed. The emails will be deleted when retrieved via POP so you should most definately NOT try this with your existing active email account or you may delete all your mail.
Once you have done this you can go about installing Zenphoto. Again this a quick and easy process and you can find all the required documentation on their website.
After this is done you can then install WordPress, again check their site for documentation. It doesn’t matter where on your server you install it, no-one should ever see it, you just need to make sure that both your gallery and WordPress blog are installed on the same filesystem, you can’t make this work if the sites are with two seperate hosting providers or on two different servers. You will also have to setup Postie and you may want to test that it works before moving on to the next steps, again Postie is easy to use and well documented as far as WordPress plugins go.
Once the WordPress blog has been installed, log in as the administrator and change a few settings.
After installing the WordPress blog we can go into the “Miscellaneous” settings in WordPress and change the upload path for our images. What this folder is will depend on where you have installed your gallery software but basically I am pointing it to the album root directory for my install of Zenphoto. (as above) You will need to include the full path to your files as seen on the server, not the web page, and you can find these details easily from your hosting account page. I also just wanted a single album with all the stuff for my dropbox in it so I unchecked the option to break up the files based on the month/year.
WordPress also has the useful feature of resizing files automatically as you upload them to create smaller thumbnails. The issue here is that we don’t actually want this as they are not required, will clutter up the album and ultimately waste space. To prevent WordPress from making these files we just set all the max sizes for all the thumbnails to zero. (as above)
Another thing that needs to be considered is that every time an email is submitted, a post will be published in your unused blog. After time these could really start to pile up. To avoid this you can get a plugin “Auto Delete Posts” which will delete posts after they are a certain age old. The reality is that once the images are uploaded and moved into the uploaded content directory in wordpress, we don’t need the posts anymore anyway.
Security Measure for Zenphoto
In order to prevent anyone from directly linking to files in your albums (both public AND private) you need to create a .htaccess file with the following code into your “albums” folder within your Zenphoto install. This will break the playback of movie files in your galleries but it really depends on your requirements.
<Files *>
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Files>
And that is it!
So there you go, if you have done all of these things you will have yourself a brand new email dropbox to go with your online gallery. You are free to edit the album that will appear in Zenphoto to put passwords on it, etc and do whatever you like.
The bonus over something like Picasa is that, depending on your hosting plan you may have stacks more space and you can now control all of the steps in the process and can tailor them to suit your requirements.
Known Limitations
- Lack of ability to add image captions via email (The subject and body of the email will be placed in the post, not in the image itself and will therefore not make it into the gallery)
- How quickly the images appear in your dropbox after being emailed will depend on how frequently you have postie checking your mail server. (you should note that since people are not visiting this actual wordpress blog, cronless postie plugin will not work, you will need to use cron or have an iframe on another page which will trigger postie to check the email)
- The size of the emails that can be handled will depend on your hosting situation. Testing this on my Hostgator share webhosting allows emails of up to about 5mb to be processed. This is not ideal but is sufficient for how I use the dropbox, as bulk uploads of large images should be done via FTP or something anyway.
Blog | Iteration 31/07/2009 | 
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