Portfolio – a PHP application to manage photos

In 2003, I started the development of a PHP application, named Portfolio, to easily manage photo albums and photos. Similar PHP scripts existed, but I had lost my previous job, was looking for a new one… So doing some development at home was a good way to spend free time and try to do a nice little app that could be more suitable for my own needs. I put the source code online, got a few users that were interested by this app… Then, I found a new job :-) I slowed down the development of Portfolio, then completely stopped it a few months later. Since that time, Portfolio is still the backend I use to manage my own pictures and power the Photo section of this site.

Back in 2007, I’m re-discovering the pleasure of doing some coding at home, as I’m no longer working on engineering. And – guess what -, I’m working on new features for Portfolio.

Since 2003, the way to manage photos has considerably changed. Here are, I think, the main evolutions that had a deep impacts on our way to manage digital photographies:

• Digital Photography – through digital cameras but also mobiles phones / smart phones – now rules. Direct effect: the number of photographies that are produced has exploded and, I’m sure, will continue to increase.
• Flickr has shown how easy it could be to share photos on the web. Great management tools (easy uploading, tagging…), creation of communities… Flickr changed the rules on the web.
• Free Maps APIs (especially from Google and Yahoo!) have made geography interactive and fun, and it’s now quite easy to place photos on a map (ok, we still miss SLRs with embedded GPS, let’s hope for 2008).
• More and more metadatas are added on pictures, including all the data captured by the digital camera itself and manually added data (coordinates, tags, ratings, description…).

So what could I bring with Portfolio? I don’t have a clear vision yet, but here are some features I’d like to implement in the near future:

• Tag management and tagclouds (in progress, see first experiment on this photo album)
• Support of Yahoo! Maps (in progress, see first experiment on this photo album)
• More import / export options.
  • Import of Adobe XMP could ease the integration of metadatas coming from Adobe Lightroom / Adobe Bridge, including tags, ratings…
  • Export to Google Earth / Google Maps could be a fancy and interesting feature. Seems easy to do in KML.

I cannot provide a release date for the next release of Portfolio yet. But if you are interested to test this application, if you have some features you don’t find in other apps and would like to find in Portfolio, please post a comment.