Coppermine Photo Gallery is a perfect solution for creating image / photo galleries whether your creating a gallery to share pictures with friends and family, creating a portfolio for your photography business, or creating a community for photography enthusiasts.Coppermine Photo Gallery www.coppermine-gallery.net began as the brainchild of Gregory Demar, although it’s current incarnations the results of a collaboration of 38 developers located around the globe. These developers donate their time working on one of the most feature rich Photo Gallery programs currently available on the Internet licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Directly out of the “box” Coppermine allows you to post photos in categorized galleries, comment upon and rate the photos, merge your photo gallery with a variety of Web bulletin board systems, as well as allow your visitors to send selected photos to others as eCards. As you can see, Coppermine gives you a powerful image gallery for no more cost than the installation time.
Its Free.. But Will My Server Run It?
Coppermine has very minimal server requirements. The latest Coppermine release (version 1.4.16) has tested OK on Apache (vs. 1.3.24 and higher) or IIS server that has MySQL (vs. 3.23.23), PHP (vs. 4.1.0), and GD Library or ImageMagick installed.
Although most servers have these features, you may need to check with your hosting administrator specifically about the GD Library or ImageMagick. These libraries are used to create the image thumbnails which are displayed on the category pages within the gallery.
Don’t worry about your gallery visitors; they can visit your gallery using any of the main stream browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera.
Can My Server Install Coppermine For Me?
Many web hosting providers usecontrol panel software to allow the manipulation of the functions of your Web server. Many of them, such as cPanel and Plesk, can automatically install a preset list of programs for you. Because of Coppermine’s popularity and status, you have a good chance of finding it within this site application list.
For the Plesk Control Panel:
1. Find the list of installable applications by selecting Home page, and then the Web Applications icon. 2. Select the Add New Application icon. 3. Scroll through the list of applications and click Coppermine. 4. Your control panel will let you know if you have all of the required features for the software. If you are missing something, or have an older version of the software, then you will be notified. Otherwise, click on the Install button. 5. Agree to the License agreement, then click Next. 6. Under the Installation Preferences heading, specify the directory for your installation. This is be default set to “coppermine”. 7. Under the Database Settings heading, specify a Name for the database. Your Plesk installation will provide a default. You may wish to change this to something more easily identified. 8. Specify the Login Name for that database. Plesk will also provide a default value for this field. You probably won’t like this default, so I suggest changing it to something that you can remember, or at least make sense of 3 months from now. 9. Type your Login Password into its appropriate field. Write this down in case you, or your server administrator needs direct access to your database outside of the Coppermine interface. 10. Type your Login Password into the Confirm Password field. 11. Beneath Administrator’s Preferences heading specify the Administrator’s Login name. This is the name you will use when logging into the administration panel of Coppermine itself. 12. Specify the Password, and then type the same information into the Confirm Password field. The password can be changed later in the Coppermine Administration Control Panel. 13. Specify the email address used for the Coppermine Administrator in the Administrator’s Email field. 14. Under the Gallery’s Preferences heading, specify a name for the gallery in the Gallery Name field. This will appear at the top of every Coppermine page on your Web site. 15. Type in a short description for your gallery in the Gallery Description field. You can specify the purpose of the Gallery, or maybe even a keyword rich description of the type of photos that a visitor will find here. 16. In the Other Preferences section, you will find a list of Theme’s that you can choose from. I suggest just using the classic theme for now. You can change this later from the Administration Control Panel. 17. Select the Interface Language to use for the entire Coppermine installation. This defaults to English. 18. Click the Install button.
When the installation completes you will be given confirmation on your control panel screen. The process will be similar with other control panel applications such as cPanel. Just be sure to follow the prompts on your screen, and make sure that you are making notes as you go. There are few things more frustrating than installing a new application, and forgetting the password to log into it on the first night.
Can I Manually Install Coppermine?
If your server does not have a Coppermine listed in its selection of installable Web Applications, or if your server doesn’t have a control panel at all, you can still install Coppermine with FTP access.If you do not have FTP access on your server, or if you are not sure if you do, contact your administrator and they can set this up for you.
1. Go to www.coppermine-gallery.net and click the Download link located in the link bar at the top of the page. 2. Once on the Sourceforge.net download page, scroll down until you see the File Releases heading. Select the cpg1.4.16.zip or the cpg1.4.16.tar.gz file. As you can see, there are a lot of add-ons and themes that you can use download and install for Coppermine. Once you have your base installation working, you can start applying these add-ons at your leisure. 3. Once the file is downloaded, extract it to its own directory, being sure to maintain its internal directory structure. 4. Open your FTP program and log into your Web server. Upload the files to your server using the Auto mode. This will force all images to be uploaded as Binary files, and all others as ASCII or text files. All of your PHP files should be uploaded in the ASCII. 5. While in your FTP program, select the “albums” directory and change its permissions to 777. Depending on your FTP software it may be referenced as CHMOD settings. If you are unsure how to do this, check your FTP software’s help system or your webhost administrator. 6. Change the file permissions of the “include”, “albums/userpics”, “albums/edit”, “logs”, and “plugin” folders to 777. 7. Close your FTP client. 8. Go to your Web server control panel, or contact your administrator, and set up a database for use with Coppermine. You will need to know the database location (often Localhost), database name, the database administrator login name, and the administrator password. You must have all of this information in order to continue. 9. Open up your Coppermine installation install.php file through your Web browser by going to your web site and directory where you installed the program. For instance: http://your_web_site.com/coppermine/install.php 10. On the Install screen, you will need to designate the login information for your Administrator’s account. Type your Username, Password, and Email address, into the appropriate fields. 11. Take out your database information, and fill in the requested information for your MySQL database installation. Typically you can use “localhost” for your MySQL Host name, although this may be different for your specific server. If you have trouble using this designation, contact your server administrator. 12. Provide the Database Name, Username, and Password in the appropriate fields. 13. The MySQL Table Prefix box simply identifies the prefix applied to all tables that Coppermine will create within your database. You can leave this with the default setting. 14. If you wish to use ImageMagick for your graphic manipulation software, specify the path to it in the ImageMagick Path field. If you leave these blank, then Coppermine will automatically use the server’s GD Libraries, if installed. 15. Click the Let’s Go! button once you have verified all of the information you have provided on this page.
Now that your installation is complete, you are ready to start personalizing your new photo gallery. To continue onto the administration panel where you can log in, click the Let’s Continue button.
*** Once your installation is complete, create a backup of your include/config.inc.php file using your FTP program.
What If I Have Trouble?
Generally there is little trouble with the installation of Coppermine, but if you do experience issues, you do have options available to you. Here are some of the most common issues that arise with any software installations on a web hosting server. If these suggestions don’t help, you can get support from Coppermine’s developers at: http://coppermine-gallery.net/demo/cpg14x/docs/faq.htm
Do you have the correct software loaded?
Check with your web host administrator asking about any other installations of Coppermine running on their servers. Be sure to let them know what versions of GD Libraries, ImageMagik, PHP and MySQL that Coppermine requires. If your server does not have these programs, they may be able to update them for you. In the event that they cannot, then you can find a variety of other available web hosts that should be able to host Coppermine sites at www.web-site-hosting-reviews.com just be sure to read about each host carefully before you make your decisions.
Are your file permissions correct?
During the installation procedure, Coppermine must have “write” access to a variety of directories and files If these files are not set with the CHMOD permissions of 777 then the installation will not be able to complete. You can often check and change, your file permissions using your FTP software. Because some software doesn’t accurately reflect the true file permissions on your server, you may want to change the “albums“, “albums/edit“, “albums/userpics“, “include“, “logs“, and “plugin” folders to 777 just to ensure the settings are correct.
Did you properly FTP the files for each file type?
When you are uploading your files in mass to a server, you can easily upload some text files in Binary mode. To ensure this doesn’t happen, re-upload all of the PHP files using the ASCII file transfer mode within your FTP program.
Do you have the correct information set up for your database?
If your installation is giving you errors referencing your database, you most likely do not have the correct information for accessing it. You can either verify this information by contacting your Web host administrators, or you can reconfigure your databases using your control panel. Make sure to write the information down so that you make no errors when providing this information to Coppermine.
Ok.. Its Installed.. How Do I Make it Work?
With the installation complete, you must configure the software to fit in within your existing web site, and ensure that your site visitors have access. This is also a good time to familiarize yourself with the features of your new software program. If you clicked the Lets Continue button when the installation completed you are now looking at the default Coppermine interface.
When using Coppermine you have the option to control how many of its features function, as well as what it looks like. You can start the configuration by clicking the Config button. Read through this list. As you can see you have the following options available:
General Settings: controls the name, description, contact emails, addresses, and other overall aspects of the gallery.
Language and Charset: allows you to choose between 46 different languages and a dozen character sets.
Themes Settings: allows you to choose between the 9 pre-installed themes, and control menu options, help availability, and link to customized headers and footers; all of which is allowing you to customize the entire look of your site. There are over 50 additional themes that you can download from
Album List View: allows you to control the size of your thumbnails, the total number of albums and category levels to display, and how those albums are displayed.
Thumbnail View: allows you to configure the total number of thumbnails displayed on a single page, and the presence of the file captions and user comments below those thumbnails.
Image View: allows you to control the appearance of your individual images, including size, and the presense of the film strip thumbnails that will by default appear underneath an image when loaded full screen.
Comment Settings: controls the contents of user comments. If you don’t want someone adding vulgar language to your photo comments, block them, while controlling how much anyone can say about a specific picture.
Files and Thumbnail Settings: From this screen you can control the dimensions, quality, and file size of any photos that are uploaded to your gallery. These settings allow you to open your photo gallery to uploads by other people, without allowing them to completely bog down your server with overly large images. The Advanced settings section allows you to control what types and lengths of movies that you are going to allow to be displayed. This includes how the image and movies will be stored, how they can start playing for users, and what types of methods must be used for resizing them to best fit with your screen layout.
User Settings: Basically this is the area where you can control who gets to use your board, and what types of access they can have. You can give everyone with admin rights, or no one other than yourself. You can have users that can be temporarily banned, or not allow users to upload images at all. The power is yours.
Custom Fields for User Profiles: If you wanted to set up specific fields for your users profiles to fill in, such as their web site, or full business name, then you can add those here. You only have 6 fields to use, so choose wisely.
Custom Fields for Image Description: As with the Custom Fields for User Profiles, you can set up your own fields for descriptions of images. These may include locations where the photos were taken, specific equipment used to take the pictures, or anything else that might be important to your photo gallery. You have only 4 fields to use here.
Cookies Settings: Coppermine uses cookies to keep track of who has logged in, and keep people logged in through multiple visits to your site. You can find the settings to configure these cookies here, although they rarely need changed.
Email Settings: Coppermine can send email o ut to your gallery administrator, as well as your users. If you need to use an email server that is not located on your Web host you can specify the information for that server here. As most Web hosts do incorporate an SMTP email server, then you shouldn’t have to adjust any of these settings.
Logging and Statistics: One feature that most other free online photo gallery software programs do not have is the elaborate and detailed logs that are kept by Coppermine. If you wish to use your logs, turn them on, and then keep checking back. You can learn a lot about how people use your gallery by watching the information you get from them.
Maintenance Settings: Although rarely used, you can force Coppermine into a debug mode that will give you detailed information on any errors that are being generated from your gallery.
In addition to all of the admin settings, which control the majority of your software features, you can control the categories and albums used. You can group your users so that each individual only has access to the photographs or images that you want. You can Ban individuals from using your site at all. You can sort photographs, review user comments, and add files in large batches. There truly isn’t much that you can’t do with Coppermine. Now that you have the software installed, and the basic configuration done, the best way to really get to know what you have is play with it. Read the included documentation for help.
The Coppermine Photo Gallery development team maintains a large support forum with a very active developer presence. If you ever have any questions, problems, or issues with the software, Coppermine developers seem to average about 2 hours to respond to support requests on their forum. Let this assuage your worries about working with GNU/GPL software. Although you have decided to go with free software, you aren’t going to be left on your own.
How does Coppermine Compare to its Competition?
There are a lot of other GNU/GPL photo gallery software programs available that you could use, but Coppermine is definitely one of the best. Hopefully this table, showing some of the specialized features of Coppermine, will help you do a little quick comparison shopping.
Where Can I See Coppermine In Action?
If you want to check out some Coppermine installations before you invest your time and hosting space you may want to take a look at these sites. Some of them are personal; some professional.
Overall Coppermine is one of the better choices for setting up an image gallery for your web site. Although it is more configuration intense than other options, it makes up for its learning curve with a plethora of features that just can’t be beat with other GNU/GPL software programs that are currently available. If you simply want a fast way to show off a half dozen photos you took on your last vacation, Coppermine is probably over-kill. But if you are wanting to create a true community of family and friends, or even potential business clients, Coppermine will allow you to start of with all of the features you will need, and keep growing as the developers continue to add features to the product.
———————————— Heather Williamson has been a professional writer and author since 1997 when she had her
first IT related book published. Since then she has published 11 more Internet and technology related titles covering the gamut from browser technology, to XML, from Dreamweaver to Linux Applications. She has been involved in Internet related software development for 14 years, and runs her own web development and contract writing firm in East Texas.
————————————
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[...] software for your site the ZenPhoto may be the solution you are looking for (we have reviewed Coppermine photo gallery in the past and it’s one of the competitors of ZenPhoto). It got a Web 2.0 SEOMoz honorable [...]
As a web developer for over 13 years I have used Coppermine. While the actual gallery is a nice product, if you need support beware! The only support is in a forum where you may be treated rudely and banned if you actually have the nerve to insist on an actual answer to a question. This has happened to me several times when I asked a simple question and just got a run-around then told I was rude because I pointed out the fact that no one ever answered the question I asked.
If you are good at code…fine it is a good gallery. If you run into problems don’t count on much help in the forums.
I second Paul’s comment. The Coppermine support forum is the rudest on the web! I have never seen such a venomous attitude from a support team as the one on Coppermine. Wow! STEER CLEAR if you want to keep your dignity intact.
Paul and Josh: Coppermine is very popular. The developer are tired to answer easy questions for which you could find the answer by searching on the forum or throught the docs. ALsoa faq is available.
Remember that “Coppermine is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation.
Coppermine is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
for more details.”
jkl: I was doing some research on which photo gallery to add to my site. Your response is an example of what Paul and Josh are talking about and makes me want to avoid coppermine. If the devs are getting asked the same question frequently that is usually an indication of either poor design/implementation or unclear documentation.
Just because something is open source doesn’t mean a user should have a high level of php experience in order to use the software. If someone wants to be a committer I would agree with you. I’m a java developer and wouldn’t expect a php developer to understand the open source applications and frameworks I work with.
If the devs are really that annoyed with users then they should just shut the forums down and stop releasing code to the public. There is a saying in many software dev shops that the job would be great if we didn’t have any users.
Generally there is little trouble with the installation of Coppermine, but if you do experience issues, you do have options available to you. Here are some of the most common issues that arise with any software installations on a web hosting server. If these suggestions don’t help, you can get support from Coppermine’s developers at: http://coppermine-gallery.net/demo/cpg14x/docs/faq.htm
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September 12th, 2008 at 7:54 am
cant see coppermine gallery users email addresses
[Reply]
October 4th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Ik kan geen foto’s uploaden terwijl dat altijd goed is gegaan.
Weet u een oplossing????
[Reply]
October 4th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I don’t know why you can’t upload photos anymore. You don’t say what error is. Maybe it’s permissions related?
[Reply]
March 31st, 2009 at 1:07 am
[...] software for your site the ZenPhoto may be the solution you are looking for (we have reviewed Coppermine photo gallery in the past and it’s one of the competitors of ZenPhoto). It got a Web 2.0 SEOMoz honorable [...]
April 24th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
As a web developer for over 13 years I have used Coppermine. While the actual gallery is a nice product, if you need support beware! The only support is in a forum where you may be treated rudely and banned if you actually have the nerve to insist on an actual answer to a question. This has happened to me several times when I asked a simple question and just got a run-around then told I was rude because I pointed out the fact that no one ever answered the question I asked.
If you are good at code…fine it is a good gallery. If you run into problems don’t count on much help in the forums.
[Reply]
May 1st, 2009 at 12:59 am
I second Paul’s comment. The Coppermine support forum is the rudest on the web! I have never seen such a venomous attitude from a support team as the one on Coppermine. Wow! STEER CLEAR if you want to keep your dignity intact.
[Reply]
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:06 am
Paul and Josh: Coppermine is very popular. The developer are tired to answer easy questions for which you could find the answer by searching on the forum or throught the docs. ALsoa faq is available.
Remember that “Coppermine is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation.
Coppermine is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY
or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
for more details.”
[Reply]
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:41 pm
jkl: I was doing some research on which photo gallery to add to my site. Your response is an example of what Paul and Josh are talking about and makes me want to avoid coppermine. If the devs are getting asked the same question frequently that is usually an indication of either poor design/implementation or unclear documentation.
Just because something is open source doesn’t mean a user should have a high level of php experience in order to use the software. If someone wants to be a committer I would agree with you. I’m a java developer and wouldn’t expect a php developer to understand the open source applications and frameworks I work with.
If the devs are really that annoyed with users then they should just shut the forums down and stop releasing code to the public. There is a saying in many software dev shops that the job would be great if we didn’t have any users.
[Reply]