Question

It’s been a long time since I did anything in flash, and today, I just received an assignment to create a photo album creator (aka PAC) with a PHP/Mysql backend. It would be great if anyone can recommend off the shelf modules I can incorporate into my project. Any additional advice would be helpful. Here are the requirements for the PAC:

a) user can upload N number of photos into the PAC, which means I’ll need a good file manager that let’s people add, delete, move and rename files on the server

b) user can create M number of pages in a photo album and then assign any combination of images to a particular page

c) user can resize images on any page

d) user can crop any image on any page

e) user can save the album and edit it at a later time

Each of the items above could take at least a week to build from scratch. Is there anything out there that can expedite my development time?

Thanks

Answer 1

This looks more like a superuser.com question.

I’m no PHP expert but here are some thoughts:

• a) PHPfm or FileThingie might
  do it for files.
• b) It’s up to you how you organize/design
  your table/database structure to
  accomodate collections/albums/etc.
• c,d) – ImageMagick or GD
  library can easily handle crops
  and resize, and even more.
• e) – see b)

If it’s a commercial project and time is a constraint consider solutions like SlideShowPro.

It has been around for a few good years, has a nice design, good support, in short it’s an affordable and professional product.

If you don’t consider buying this, analyze it, break it down, see what works well and how and most importantly how you can improve this.