Emil’s Chronicle - The journal of Emil A Eklund

Back in the late summer of 2003 (yeah, that’s about a year and a half ago) I started to develop a new version of the software that drives my online photo gallery. It seems, however, the second system syndrome cough me and thus the ambition was to fix everything that was lacking in the old version at once. Since the old version was just a quick perl hack there was not much that could be reused so the new system is redesigned from the ground up. It uses a PostgreSQL database to store information about the images and the application is implemented in C++ using FastCGI and the WAL toolkit (which I will publish one of these days).

It’s still not completed but most of the functionality exists, some of the more interesting ones:

• Galleries organized in categories
• Images and galleries can be commented
• Images can be rated
• Friendly URIs

On top of that there’s Facefinder, which provides a method to highlight different areas of a photo and mark that as a persons face. The name of the person who’s face has been highlighted is then displayed below the photo, and on hover the selection is shown. This information is also used to generate small images of that persons face from various photos. I believe this is best explained by an example, so look at this or this photo and see for yourself. Hover the names to the right just under the photo, then click one of them.

I would love to get some feedback, but please keep in mind that it’s still in beta, and everything doesn’t always work as expected. If you would like to get an account (to comment and to try the admin part of facefinder) let me know and I’ll set one up, as the signup functionality is not there yet.

http://gallery.eae.net/