Ochiba 1.1 review

Ochiba is a web-based image gallery written in PHP and uses sqlite

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 64K Developer: Ochiba Team

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Ochiba is a web-based image gallery written in PHP and uses sqlite.
Ochiba is a hybrid of traditional "photo album" software, such as Gallery or Coppermine, and "image board" software, such as futaba, futallaby, and wakaba.

In addition, it borrows concepts found in sources such as gmail and iPhoto to provide a flexible, keyword/tag based filtering of displayed images which can be used to create on-the-fly "virtual" albums.

Other features include: XHTML/CSS compliance, RSS feeds for image categories, post throttling, IP banning, caching, visual image-based post verification for spam-prevention, and zip file handling (for multiple images in one upload).

Ochiba is released under the GNU General Public License.

The genesis of ochiba arose from my purchase of a camphone. I planned on using it a lot to create a "moblog" or "photoblog". Initially, I used Gallery, as it was software I had already been using and had been mostly pleased with it. However, with this moblog project, some of the design decisions made by Gallery (and most other photo album software) became limiting to me. Primary was the way comments and discussion of pictures were usually relegated to an afterthought. In the case of Gallery, only a little red asterisk indicates that an image has a comment. Even as the owner of a Gallery, sometimes I wouldn't notice a visitor had left a comment until months later.

I wanted something more like what was presented by image board software, where comments and discussion are as important as the image itself. However, I didn't like the requirements for the major image board software (in particular, MySQL for all three, and perl for wakaba). And though I admired the open-posting image board idea, I also wanted to have something only I could post to.

The 3rd converging idea came from gmail, iPhoto, and iTune's smart playlists. They use keyword/label/tag based filtering to organize mail/photos/music, rather than a strict hierarchy. Gallery is limited to albums and nested albums. I wanted more flexibility, to present an image in a variety of contexts, to have more freeform organization.

What's New in This Release:
A dollar-sign bug with HTML_Template_IT was fixed.
The RSS link was removed from keyword pages.
The error message when exceeding the maximum upload size was improved.