Ansel 2.3 review

Ansel is a picture gallery for web sites

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Federico D. Sacerdoti

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Ansel is a picture gallery for web sites. It is a high quality, information-rich photo gallery designed to handle large numbers of images and albums. Ansel stores all its images in a database, making it both fast and flexible.

Ansel is similar in spirit to Shutterfly and Yahoo pictures, but does not place restrictions on image size. It was named after Ansel Adams, the famous twentieth century naturalist photographer of the
American West.

Ansel is free; it carries a BSD liscence which allows many different types of usage including commercial ones. However along with this fact comes some caveats. It is designed to be easy to use, but not necessarily easy to setup. In fact it's a bit advanced in that department.

Ansel requires a webserver with the PHP/PHP-MySQL engine, and a running MySQL database. You may need to know the basics of PHP, MySQL, and Apache to get things running.

I have tried to make Ansel use relative paths instead of absolute ones to make it play nicely with the rest of your site and to allow multiple instances.

Your system must have ImageMagic installed, specifically mogrify (named from Calvin&Hobbes I believe) and montage. These are used for image manipulation and are generally available by default on Linux systems.

Apache

Ansel allows images to be uploaded to the gallery remotely, which means potentially anyone can add pictures. In Ansel 2.0 passwords are used to protect pictures in an album. Security is by-album, not by-picture, which shouldn't be too much of a problem.

However, you must serve this site over HTTPS to safely encrypt passwords sent from browsers. A 403 password box sends usernames and passwords in plain text, and only by running the site over encrypted channels (like https) can security be called anything close to safe. Apache has an excellent and free mod_ssl which will run https.

MySQL

You have to create the ansel database in MySQL and give select and update permissions to a user. Ones that will work off the bat would be:

mysql> grant select,update,insert on ansel.* to apache@localhost;

To create the database do the following as root:

$ mysqladmin create ansel
$ mysql ansel < ansel.sql

The ansel.sql file is contained in the ansel/sql directory.

PHP

I believe Ansel expects to have magicquotes turned off. This affects how quotes are returned from the database. You should change the resource limits to allow large picture uploads. These are for my Linux RedHat system (Built with Rocks 3.1), the exact locations of these file may vary for you.

In File /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf:
LimitRequestBody 16777216

In File /etc/php.ini:
; Maximum size of POST data that PHP will accept.
post_max_size = 60M

; Maximum allowed size for uploaded files.
upload_max_filesize = 20M

What's New in This Release:
Security was improved by removing the requirement for PHP's register_globals setting.
Minor features including a more dynamic gallery home page were added.