Gallery and iPhoto?

Is anyone else working on a way to have gallery work with iPhoto albums?

I think it would be cool if you could continue to use iPhoto to create/manage your albums but then have Gallery be the web interface to by accessing iPhoto's DB files so you don't have to recreate albums, thumbnails and/or captions.

I am willing to start this but don't want to recreate the wheel if I don't have to....typical programmer laziness I guess.

TIA for any info anyone has on this.
-eileen

Ironicially, this is why I registered, to request such a possibility. Probably the best way to do this would be to implement some type of sync software, applying changes on either side to the other library (ie, make a caption change in Gallery, have it sync to iPhoto somehow). Even one way syncing would be a great first step. With Gallery Remote working on OS X now, it shouldn't be too hard tapping into that program to create such a sync utility. Unfortunatly I'm only PHP geared, so I can't offer any help on the Mac OS side of things.

If such a thing ever exists, I'd definitly donate some money to help out though. And I'm sure once it existed, quite a few people would love this over paying for a .mac subscription for decent web photo sharing.

Brief discussion, but nothing happening at least yet.

I had started looking into it, but then I lost my digital camera (!), and don't have much time any more for a huge undertaking, so it's sort of on my back-burner right now. That said, I at least have an idea how iPhoto exports images, and am trying to weed through the iPhoto-->iTools feature to generate a plugin that would publish to Gallery. Luckily, iPhoto is completely Cocoa/Objective-C, so it's easy to peek into its innards. I'm not spending much time on it, but I'd love to know if anyone else out there is doing the same thing and some time could be saved. :smile:

(If you want to read up, the goal is to make an "iPhotoExporter" "PlugIn". It will help you a bit to learn the basic structure of a Cocoa app and how these plugins integrate with the application.)

-Beckett (

)

Tight integration of Gallery with iPhoto -- this is the "holy grail" I've been looking forward to for some time!

In the meantime, I have been using a great solution from Michael Mulligan called "myPhoto."

http://agent0068.dyndns.org/~mike/projects/myPhoto/index.php

Basically this PHP program takes your iPhoto library (and albums) and makes them available on your web server, much like Gallery does. But it's integration with iPhoto is what makes it cool. All a Mac OS X user has to do is import his/her photos into iPhoto, organize and label them, and they are immediately available on their web server. It works extremely well.

It would be great if Gallery could support the iPhoto in the same way that myPhoto does. (That is to say, natively read the albums without any exporting needed.)

I have been actively following Gallery's progress, and am amazed at the level of complexity and user interaction allowed. (The ability for visitors to order prints from the online services makes me drool!) I am looking forward to the day that it works seamlessly with iPhoto -- because then I can encourage any number of my hundreds of clients to look to Gallery as the answer to their prayers.

I'd be interesting in helping out any way I can.

I for one have to give a big "ditto" to fofer's post...
I would also be MUCH more interested in an iphoto solution that does NOT require a second set of photos. Gallery needs to be able to parse iphoto's xml album file and simply access the files where they are. Perhaps this could be approached as a sort of "module" to gallery? ie, on admin options for an empty gallery, there could be an option for "use iphoto album" or a global option that simply creates an entire gallery reflective of the albums already arranged in iphoto.

I WOULD STRINGENTLY REQUEST ONE THING:

I must be able to use tifs. must, must, MUST! 90% of my library is tifs, and it is driving me INSANE that there are no web solutions (apparently) that are capable of handling them just like jpegs.

Any feedback? Is this possible?

BTW: I tried the iphoto to gallery hack that is available here somewhere, and it crashed iphoto every time (probably because of the tiffs) :-/

It's because, as fofer said above, I have (what seems to me) a lot of pictures, and I don't want to have a second copy of all my pictures taking up additional space on my (already limited) drive. It also would be much more convenient if it would simply be able to recreate iphoto's album structure, just by dropping a symlink into the albums folder.

But my main problem is that gallery can't import tiffs. I'd be happy if it could at least import them. I have php enabled, libtiff, permagick, libjpeg, etc. all installed, but it still doesn't seem able to import them. It always says there were no valid image files.

Any ideas? I've already tried the iphoto2gallery pkg, and it crashes when I export tiffs.

iPhotoToGallery is an iPhoto plugin that works nearly flawlessly! GET IT NOW!

URL : http://zwily.com/iphoto/

There are only a few things that could be done to the iPhotoToGallery plugin:
1) The plugin ignores comments in iphoto. Presumably it exports keywords just fine though. But I use comments.
2) If you are the administrator the list of albums is immense in the dropdown it would be nice if the plugin remembered where your album root is, or where you uploaded to last.

And yes, i've emailed the author about these features.
Joseph Elwell.

that what is being projected here isn't lopsided.

If you want to get into the digial hub/spoke model you have to realize that the mac may not be the central hub. I have a loaded poweredge dell as the root server of my home. It runs Gallery. I use mac's in 80% of the rest of the home but it doesn't make my iphoto central on each installation/laptop/pc.

Gallery is my central repository and I need something that can allow it to talk to iphoto. I would like to make books, and use the rest of osx's ilife presentation/creation tools but I have no local media and there is no easy way for me to bring the media from my server into ilife/photo/movie without doing direct copies and imports which is ardurous to say the least.

Maybe in G2 this will come about since extended API is the game but I would like to see the iPhoto to Gallery flow to be bidirectional.

-C9-

Perhaps a good approach on this, if someone implements it, would be to be able to specify the album(s) to export to Gallery. For example, I'm guessing I'm like many people in the fact that I have thousands of pics in iPhoto. I don't want them all to be uploaded to my website. However, I could easily create a folder containing an folder/album stucture that would represent the gallery install on my website. The plugin could then be used to sync that folder. (Or, you could specify the root of iPhoto as well) I think that the iPhoto DB (which is an xml file) contains change date information. So, if the plugin remembers the last time it was run, it should be albe to sync the changes since then.

In fact, it might be easier to not use iPhoto at all and have an external app do this. I know there are other apps out there that can parse the iPhoto XML db file. It might be easier to create an external app and use the Core Image functionality in OS X to resize the images. Hell, there might even be a way to do it with automator.

If I were a programmer, I would tackle this myself. Alas, not enough time in the day to try...I have a 1 year old daughter, so my hands are full!

brianlees, if you truely care about an iPhoto plugin, I would strongly suggest some posts in the G2 forums. Maybe a search or two first. It is about 99% sure that something like this will NEVER be furhter developed / created / expanded for G1 since it is reaching its end of life (eol).

But G2 is being developed NOW and the Google summer of code has given gallery even more developers... so if you want something like this, goto those forums! Write up a detailed post, then perhaps even write an RFE.

If you want to do it yourself, awsome. If you pay someone to do it, cool. If you want it for free, suggest the idea and hope a dev likes it (or one of the google summer of code people wants to do it). It might not come before the actual release of G2, but if its a good idea that is well presented then surely some developer somewhere will like it enough to do it.

I don't use iPhoto or the XP Agent..... Gallery remote should be a good option as well.

____________________________________________________
Blog with G2 || Gallery Frames / Mods || G1 Test Gallery

http://gallery.menalto.com/node/31827

Hey all,

This thread is a little old, but thought I'd post here in case any of you are still looking for an iPhoto to Gallery solution. We're currently beta testing an iPhoto plug-in that allows direct exports to Gallery (supports Gallery1 and 2). If you're interested in checking out the beta, you can sign up here.

Regards,
Uriah