Photo Station alternative?

[SunChi]

Hello,
After several days of playing around with Photo Station (latest version 5.2.2) I am ready to give up. I cannot find the way to make it work as I expected. My expectation was the following:

• I put my photos in Multimedia folder, they are organized in subfolders, e.g. "Travel" -> "Europe" -> "2013" -> "Italy"
• Each folder (including subfolders) is converted to Album (so we get nested albums)
• The album covers are automatically generated from the first (alphabetically or any other way sorted) pictures
• Now, when entering the photo station, I expect to see the list of the Albums, not the chaos of randomized pictures
• The URL of the page with albums list can be given to anonymous users (only albums with Anonymous View permission to be displayed
• Support of sound and video files (with file thumbnail generation) as an option

That is, the clear logical behaviour like it was in old Multimedia Station v2 on my old TS-109. I see that Multimedia Station is not supported anymore and it's not possible to install it on QTS4.2.2. So the two questions are:

• Is it possible to make Photo Station behave in the described way?
  and
• If not, is there a good still working alternative to achieve all these functions?

What is the most popular photo albums managing application (besides the Photo Station) for x86 NAS at the moment?

[CylonCenturion]

Hello,
After several days of playing around with Photo Station (latest version 5.2.2) I am ready to give up. I cannot find the way to make it work as I expected. My expectation was the following:

• I put my photos in Multimedia folder, they are organized in subfolders, e.g. "Travel" -> "Europe" -> "2013" -> "Italy"
• Each folder (including subfolders) is converted to Album (so we get nested albums)
• The album covers are automatically generated from the first (alphabetically or any other way sorted) pictures
• Now, when entering the photo station, I expect to see the list of the Albums, not the chaos of randomized pictures
• The URL of the page with albums list can be given to anonymous users (only albums with Anonymous View permission to be displayed
• Support of sound and video files (with file thumbnail generation) as an option

That is, the clear logical behaviour like it was in old Multimedia Station v2 on my old TS-109. I see that Multimedia Station is not supported anymore and it's not possible to install it on QTS4.2.2. So the two questions are:

• Is it possible to make Photo Station behave in the described way?
  and
• If not, is there a good still working alternative to achieve all these functions?

What is the most popular photo albums managing application (besides the Photo Station) for x86 NAS at the moment?

can i advise you zenphoto? http://www.zenphoto.org/

[SunChi]

Thanks CylonCenturion,
Actually I tried it (and also Gallery3) already. Did not find the interface user-friendly, for example photos folder at installation time was not changeable and it did not point to Multimedia as expected. Also it required to create albums and upload photos manually, while everything is already there – organized by subfolders, the app just has to pick it up.

[Toxic17]

you do not need to setup folders manually, you can use your internal "Photos" folder. You edit the zenphoto.cfg.php (in zp-data folder)

mine is set like so:

Code: Select all

$conf['album_folder'] = '/share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/Multimedia/photo/';
$conf['album_folder_class'] = 'external';

Zenphoto, like all other apps however create thumbnails of the images which can take a considerable time to create.

[SunChi]

Thank you Toxic17, I will try it once again. Native Photo Station is too frustrating after Multimedia Station (which was also not ideal, but way more convenient).

[Toxic17]

One you have cached the images, it should work fine. within caching, the images are re-cached when you view each separate image, so it may take some time to view each image individually.

I found it better to cache each type/size of cache seprately. so select 1 type, cache the images then do it again for a different type/size.

if you try to create the standard 4 images (3 thumbnails and one image "cache") per real image, you will hammer the cpu and it will take forever. I suppose it depends on the amount of images you have. though I have enough (approx 21000 jpgs) and it takes a while even on a TVS-463.

Capture.JPG

just select one of the highlighted boxes at a time, then cache, then do again for the others.

[SunChi]

Well, I'm having over 60k jpeg photos here which are searched and accessed rather often – that's why image organizing is very essential task.
Unfortunately could not find the mentioned Cache tabs anywhere in the Options though thumbnails seem to be generated correctly – only once per each newly opened album.
Trying to study this script a bit further, though found some problems with selecting languages, outputting icons etc. already. Also found out that it doesn't support BMP and possibly other image formats of the past, which is a pity. And those images are not handled correctly as 'unknown files', but displayed as broken (not found) JPEGs, which looks like a bug.

[kosmonaftt]

@SunChi did you found an alternative app of Photo Station?
I'm having the exact same issue as you.
Adding them straight to the Multimedia folder doesn't make sense for me.
Much more useful would be organizing them in folders

[Toxic17]

You could try piwigo or zenphoto perhaps.

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using Tapatalk