First project - introduction (Part 1)

My first blog project is something I have fought with during these last months and which has been both challenging and rewarding. The problem in essence is about managing a big collection (417 371 as now) of - ehem - art photos found on the net and lying now on hard disks of my Linux server. I will not discuss how they have ended there for various reasons, even though it would be an excellent and possibly quite popular article (yes, PHP plays big part in it). Maybe in some form in the future, but just maybe... OK, I'll give a few hints in the second part of this series of articles but we won't go in the details.

To follow and possibly duplicate my project you'll need at least a computer with PHP and a database. Mine are Linux and Mysql, but changing both of those are trivial for a PHP programmer who knows the basics of the language - and others are free to envy us ;)

The main problems with this size of a photo collection are at least the following two:

1. there are duplicates (often multiple duplicates) of photos as they come from different sources
2. there are photos I myself don't label as .. umm .. artistic

In the series I am about to write, I'll show how I have tried to overcome these two problems. Life would have been easier if I had this routine already in the beginning but as the nature of this kind of project (as a leisure time project) is quite evolutive I'll have to try to handle challenges as they come.

When trying to resolve the problems I try to achieve at least the following goals:

• minimize disk size taken by unneeded photos (duplicates or unsavoury)
• keep the highest quality photo
• try to prune all similar photos whenever possible

I hope I have now given you the introduction needed and it's about time to jump into the project.