Where to start

[cyote101]

Hello, Thanks for all your help on my last post.

I have a new one. I'm working on my first site and i have come to the conclusion that i need to take a different approach. I'm making an image website. I will have 1000s eventually and sitting there making each page will take me months at best. So i was sitting there thinking there has gotta be a better way and then i thought. If i could make a database where i can catalog all the images and then have a script that i embed in all my pages that pulls the image assigned to the page URL i would be done in a week or 2.

Now i have no idea if that's possible but that would be cool. So any ideas u guys have would be great. Pointers on where to start etc.


Thanks again and i hope everyone had a happy St Pattys

[djr33]

This is of course possible and can be entirely automated. You can either manually catalog all of them (so you can, for example, add a custom caption), or you can just have them automatically organized, linked and displayed by a script.

What you need is a PHP image gallery, but that can take many forms.

I suggest looking into PHP and MySQL to create a database of images. Remember: never store images in the database-- just store their filenames (and paths, if needed) for where you store them.

You can also create an "admin" page where you can manage the captions, upload images, delete images, etc. But that will be more work.

Personally I'd probably code this myself for extra control, but there are also many out there already that you could use. One is here:
http://dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex4/php-photoalbum.htm
That's not exactly what you want (since you said you want a separate page per photo), but the same basic techniques can be used to accomplish that also.

Think about how you want to approach this and if you want to start with PHP and MySQL, take a look here:
http://php-mysql-tutorial.com
It's a good tutorial, but remember to click "view all articles" and go to the last page then start at the bottom-- they go from newest (most advanced) to oldest (beginner).