Coppermine Photo Gallery - Your Online Photo Gallery

Coppermine online documentation

 

Categories, albums and pictures

The Coppermine Photo Gallery (CPG) works in the following way:

  • Pictures are stored in albums
  • Albums are organised in categories
  • Categories can be nested (subcategories)

If you don't have many albums, you don't need to use categories. In that case you don't create any category and all your albums will appear on the main page of the script.

There is a special category named "User galleries". This category can't be deleted. If a user belongs to a group where "can have a personal gallery" is set to YES, he will have the right to create his own albums and his gallery will be a sub-category of "User galleries".

The administrator can create albums in any category. Regular users can only create albums in "User galleries/Their_username".

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Admin mode & User mode

When you are logged in as an admin, the script has two modes of operation : Admin mode & User mode. You switch between Admin & User mode by clicking on the corresponding link in the menu bar at the top of the screen.

When you are in admin mode, you can administer your gallery and the following menu bar appears :

When you are in user mode you are just a regular user and can't access the admin pages.

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The group control panel

This is where you define what members of a group can and can't do.

The disk quota applies only for groups where "Can have a personal" gallery has been set to "YES". Only pictures uploaded by a user in his personal gallery are included in the quota.

Use the anonymous group to define what non-registered users can and can't do. Quota and "Can have a personal gallery" are meaningless for anonymous users.

Bear in mind that if a user is a member of a group where "can rate pictures", "can post comments" or "can upload pictures" is set YES, he will have the right to perform these operations only in albums where they are allowed, ie. uploading pictures will only be possible in albums where "Visitors can upload pictures" has been set to YES.

If "can have a personal gallery" is set to YES, the members of the group will have their own gallery in the "User galleries" category where they will be able to create their own albums.

If "priv. upl. approval" is set to NO, pictures uploaded by members of the group in albums created in their own gallery won't need to be approved by the admin.

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The categories control panel

This is where you can edit your categories.

  • The button allows you to edit the title, description and parent category of an existing cetegory.
  • The button allows you to delete a category. Deleting a category does not delete the albums and pictures it contains. They are simply moved to the "Root" category.
  • The and buttons allow you to order your categories.
  • The "Move into" dropdown lists allow you to change the parent of a specific category.

"User galleries" is a special category. It is not visible unless you have some users that have created their own gallery. It can't be deleted but you can edit its title and description by using the button.

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Modifying albums/picture

When you are in admin mode there is a menu displayed next to each album

Delete allows you to delete the album and all pictures it contains.

Properties allows you to modify the name, description and permissions of the album

Edit pics allows you to modify the title/caption/keywords etc... of the pictures in the album

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Album properties

The "Album category" drop down list allows you to move an album between categories. If you set this to "* No category *" then the album will be displayed on your main page.

Coppermine understands the following bbCodes (the same bbCodes that are used by phpBB) in image and album description

The thumbnail is the picture that will represent the album in the album list.

If you have set "Users can can have private albums" to YES on the config page, you can define who can view the pictures of this album.

When "visitors can upload picture" is set to YES, it is possible to upload pictures in this album. Note that a visitor will have the right to upload pictures into an album where this option is set to YES only if he is a member of a group for which "Can upload pictures" is set to YES. Non registered users are members of the "Anonymous" group.

The same rules as above apply for "Visitors can post comments" and "Visitors can rate pictures".

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Editing pictures

This is where you can modify the title description, keywords and custom fields (if they are used) of a picture.

Use the album drop down menu to move a picture to another album.

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The configuration page

General settings

Gallery name

This is the name of your gallery. It will appear in the title of your page and is shown on some templates.

Gallery description

This is a short description of your gallery. This description is shown on some templates below the name of your gallery.

Gallery administrator email

All emails sent by the gallery are sent with this email address.

Target address for the 'See more pictures' link in e-cards

This is the URL where a user will be directed when he will click on the "See more pictures" link in an e-card. This should normally be the URL for your gallery but it may be the URL of another page of your site.

Language

This is the default language for your gallery. All language files are stored in the lang directory on your server.

The language files with an "-utf8" suffix are unicode encoded files. If you select an -utf8 file as the default language and you set "Character encoding" to "Unicode (utf-8)" then the script will auto detect the preferred language of the visitor based on what is configured in his browser. If the corresponding language is available it will be used else the default language file will be used.

When the script auto detect the preferred language, it stores the result in a cookie on the visitor's computer. To reset this cookie (and so force the script to do another auto detection) call it with something like: http://yoursite.com/coppermine_dir/index.php?lang=xxx

Once you have added some comments or pictures to your gallery, you should not change the character set of your gallery. If you do so, non-ASCII character may not be shown correctly.

Theme

Use this line to select the theme of your gallery. Themes are stored in sub-directories of the themes directory.

Album list view

Width of the main table (pixels or %)

This is the width of tables used on your main page or when you are viewing thumbnails of an album. You can enter a width in pixels or specify it in percents. The default value is 100%.

Number of levels of categories to display

The default value is 2. With this value the script will display the current categories plus one level of sub-categories.

Number of albums to display

This is the number of albums to display on a page. If the current category contains more albums, the album list will spread over multiple pages.

Number of columns for the album list

Self explanatory. The default value is 2.

Size of thumbnails in pixels

This is the size of the thumbnails that are displayed for each album. 50 means that the thumbnail will fit inside a square of 50x50 pixels.

If the size you specify there is larger than "Pictures and thumbnails settings/Max width or height of a thumbnail", the thumbnail will be stretched.

The content of the main page

This option allows you to change the content of the main page displayed by the script.

The default value is "catlist/alblist/random,2/lastup,2"

You can use the following "codes"

  • 'catlist': category list
  • 'alblist': album list
  • 'random': random pictures
  • 'lastup': last uploads
  • 'topn': most viewed
  • 'toprated': top rated
  • 'lastcom': last comments

The ,2 means 2 rows of thumbnails.

Show first level album thumbnails in categories

Use this setting to choose between showing or not showing thumbnails from the first album in the categories.

Thumbnail view

Number of columns on thumbnail page

Default value is 4 this means that each row will show 4 thumbnails.

Number of rows on thumbnail page

Default value is 3.

Maximum number of tabs to display

When the thumbnails spread over multiple pages, tabs are displayed at the bottom of the page. This value define how many tabs will be displayed.

Display picture caption (in addition to title) below the thumbnail

Toggles whether the picture caption is displayed below each thumbnail while user is in thumbnail view.

Display number of comments below the thumbnail

Toggles the display of the number of comments for below each thumbnail.

Default sort order for pictures

This option determines if you wish to have the picture caption displayed below each thumbnail while user is in thumbnail view.

Minimum number of votes for a picture to appear in the 'top-rated' list

Used to determine how many votes a picture must receive before appearing as "top-rated." If a picture has received less than "this value" votes, it will not be displayed on the "top-rated" page.

Image view & Comment settings

Width of the table for picture display (pixels or %)

The width of the table used to display the intermediate picture.

Picture information are visible by default

Define whether or not picture information (those that appear when you click on the (i) button) should be visible by default.

Filter bad words in comments

Remove "bad words" from comments. The "bad words" list is in the language file. So far only the English language file has one.

Max length for an image description

Maximum number of characters that an image description may contain.

Max number of characters in a word

This is intended to prevent that someone break the layout of the gallery by posting a long comment without space. With the default value, words with more than 38 characters are censored.

Max number of lines in a comment

Prevent a comment for containing too many new line char.

Maximum length of a comment

Maximum number of characters that a comment may contain.

Show film strip

Toggles display of a "film strip" showing thumbnails of prior and following photos in the album.

Number of items in film strip

Set the number of thumbnails to display in film strip.

Picture and thumbnail settings

Quality for JPEG files

The quality used for JPEG compression when the script resizes an image. Value can range from 0 (worst) to 100 (best). This value can be set to 75 when using ImageMagick.

Max dimension of a thumbnail

Sets the maximum size in pixels for the specified dimension for thumbnails.

This setting must not be changed if there are already photos in the gallery.

Use dimension ( width or height or Max aspect for thumbnail )

Sets the dimension for which the maximum pixel size should apply to.

This setting must not be changed if there are already photos in the gallery.

Create intermediate pictures

By default, whenever you upload a picture, the script creates a thumbnail of the picture (picture name with a thumb_ prefix) plus an intermediate version (picture name with a normal_ prefix). If you set this option to NO, the intermediate picture is not created.

Max width or height of an intermediate picture

The intermediate pictures are those that appears when you click on a thumbnail. The default value is 400, it means that the intermediate picture will fit inside a square of 400x400 pixels.

Max size for uploaded pictures (KB)

Any picture with a file size larger than this value will be rejected by the script.

Max width or height for uploaded pictures (pixels)

Limit the dimensions of the pictures that are uploaded. Resizing large pictures requires a lot of memory and consumes CPU.

User settings

Allow new user registrations

Define whether new users can self-register or not.

User registration requires email verification

If set to YES an email will be sent to the user that will contain a code to activate his account. If set to NO, user accounts become immediately active.

Allow two users to have the same email address

Allow or prevent two users from registering with the same email address.

Users can can have private albums

If set to YES then your gallery can contain albums that can be visible only by users that belong to a certain group.

If a user is a member of a group that can have its own gallery and this option is turned on then this user will have the permission to hide some of this albums to other users.

Custom fields for image description (leave blank if unused)

These fields are displayed within the "picture information" area. They will appear only if you give them a name.

Pictures and thumbnails advanced settings

Show private album Icon to unlogged user

Toggles the display of the private album icon to unlogged users.

Characters forbidden in filenames

When the filename of a picture that is uploaded contains one of these characters, it will be replaced with an underscore.

Don't change this unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Accepted file extensions for uploaded pictures

Any file uploaded whose extension is not in this list will be rejected by the script. This is intended to prevent a user from uploading non-image files.

The script can only handle image files, so you won't add support for instance for video files by adding AVI to the list.

The GD library only supports JPEG and PNG images so other types of files will be rejected even if their extension is valid.

Method for resizing images

If you are using GD 1.x and the colors of your thumbnails or intermediate image are wrong then switch to GD 2.x

Path to ImageMagick 'convert' utility (example /usr/bin/X11/)

If you are using ImageMagick convert utility to resize you picture, you must enter the name of the directory where the convert program is located there. Don't forget the trailing "/".

If your server is running under Windows, use / and not \ to separate components of the path (eg. use C:/ImageMagick/ and not C:\ImageMagick\). This path must not contain any space so under Windows don't put ImageMagick in the "Program files" directory.

ImageMagick will hardly work if PHP on your server is running in SAFE mode and it is a real challenge to get it running under Windows. Consider using GD in these cases and don't waste your time asking for support in the forum. There are too many things that can prevent ImageMagick to work correctly and without a physical access to your server it is hard to guess what is wrong.

Allowed image types (only valid for ImageMagick)

This is the list of image types that the script will accept when using ImageMagick. Image type detection is performed by reading the header of the file and not by looking at its file extension.

Command line options for ImageMagick

Here you can add options that will be appended to the command line when executing ImageMagick. Read the ImageMagick Convert manual to see what is available.

Read EXIF data in JPEG files

With this option turned on, the script will read the EXIF data stored by digicams in JPEG files. This option will work only if PHP was compiled with the EXIF extension.

The album directory

This is the base directory for your "Image Store". The path is relative to the main directory of the script.

You can use ../ in the path to move-up one level in the directory tree.

You can not use an absolute path there ("/var/my_images/" will not work) and the album directory must be visible by your web server.

The directory for user pictures

This is the directory where pictures uploaded with the web interface are stored. This directory is a subdirectory of the album directory.

The same remarks as above apply.

When you upload pictures by FTP, store them in a subdirectory of the "album directory" and not inside the "directory for user pictures".

The prefix for intermediate pictures

This prefix is added to the file name of created pictures.

The prefix for thumbnails

This prefix is added to the file name of created intermediate thumbnails.

Default mode for directories

If during the installation, the installer complained about directory not having the right permissions set this to 0777 else you won't be able to delete the directories created by the script with your FTP client the day you will decide to uninstall the script.

Default mode for pictures

If during the installation, the installer complained about directories not having the right permissions set this to 0666.

Disable right-click on full-size pop-up

CPG will attempt to block contextual menus on full-size photo pages.

Disable right-click on all "regular" pages

CPG will attempt to block contextual menus on all pages.

Cookies & Charset settings

Name of the cookie used by the script

Default value is "cpg11d". Even if you have multiple instances of the script running on the same server you can keep the default value.

Path of the cookie used by the script

Default value is "/". Don't change this unless you know what you are doing. This may prevent you from logging in.

If you have broken your gallery by modifying this value, use phpMyAdmin to edit the xxxx_config table in your database and restore the default value.

Character encoding

This should normally be set to "Default (language file)" or "Unicode (utf-8)". See the discussion in the "language" section of this page.

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Miscellaneous settings

Enable debug mode

CPG will show error messages which are normally suppressed. This is helpful in troubleshooting problems with your gallery or when asking for help on the CPG Support Forums.

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