Vincent Collins’ Weblog

I’d like to announce the first release of cfEasyAlbum today. A simple, but elegant way to display photos on a CF site without the need for a database. I’ve had many requests over the years so here it goes.

The first ‘official’ release date is today and I hope to add functionality as I find time.

A demo of the tool as well as download files can be found here

This is simple to integrate with any existing website and the tool only requires ColdFusion 6.1 or higher. NO DATABASE IS REQUIRED!!!

The whole point of this application was to keep it simple. The goal was to remove the complexities of databases and other tools and thus allow you to simply convert your photos using your tool of choice and ftp them up to the server in a self-defined structure. Tools like Picasa, which is what I use, allow you to do this easily by exporting from your existing albums. All you have to do is create a thumb, medium and optionally an original copy, put them all within your specified folders and ftp them to the site. cfEasyAlbum will automatically detect the new album and begin displaying it. No updates to a database, no clunky individual image uploading. It just works.

You can add an unlimited amount of albums and it is plenty fast.

There are really only a couple of rules you need to follow for this to work.

1. Thumbnails and medium sizes are required. Print or original is optional
2. All sizes of a given photo must be the exact same name. This is how we link them together
3. The name of the folder that houses each album is used for the name of the album.

Future Editions:

1. Admin section for changing configurations
2. Integrating a tool such as Rad Upload (http://www.radinks.com/upload/applet.php) or SWFUpload (http://swfupload.mammon.se/) to upload photos in bulk without the need for ftp.
3. Optional text file in each album directory that allows you to provide a description of the album
4. Optional Filters so you only display jpegs, gifs, or pngs

I’m considering asking for some space on RIAForge but haven’t invested the time to see how that all works. I’ve never used subversion, which is what is used there. Does anyone reading this use RIAForge to host your development project? If so, what are your thoughts? How does it work?

I have never released a piece of code ‘into the wild’ before so here is what I ask of you all. First of all, be kind! I’m sure there are things about my code that will drive some people crazy. I’m here to say however that one of the reasons I’m doing this is to make cfEasyAlbum better. I’m also interested in learning from you, the community, better coding practices. Bouncing the premise of the project, as well as the code and functionality, off you all is a good start in that direction.

So, let me know what you think! I have a thick skin when it comes to constructive criticism.