Anyone using LightboxPhoto

[peterkrogh]

Thanks Bob Smith for the write-up and lists.  Here's the salient paragraph:

After waiting ages for updates, I finally tossed my sizable investment in Imagefolio and switched to LightboxPhoto.  I learned about LightboxPhoto from other disgruntled users on ImageFolio's own forum.  There were lengthy threads on the topic that stayed up there for months.  That should tell you something about how serious the ImageFolio people were about support.  LightBoxPhoto is a vastly better product and with much better support.  I've been quite happy with the switch (maybe three years ago). I run their "Enterprise" version for hosting private pages of proofs and archives for my commercial clients.  I run it (and Imagefolio) on a self hosted server... a G5 running Leopard Server on a commercial cable internet connection.

Here's a sample of some LightBoxPhoto sites:

http://www.lightboxphoto.com/gallery_software/customize.htm

Bob Smith

_______

Hey Bob,
Thanks.  A couple questions. I see they have "IPTC" and "XMP" support. There can be a lot of ground between good and bad on these.  Does it extract and offer the use of all IPTC metadata, as well as Adobe XMP data like Ratings?  Can you configure a page to display this?

The navigation looks like a folder structure. Is if flexible so that images can be in multiple groups on the left hand panel?

Does it produce an annotated, properly color-managed file on download?

Peter

[BobSmith]

Download files are not created by LightBoxPhoto (or ImageFolio).  If you place fully annotated, color managed files for download, that's what your users are going to get.  In LightBoxPhoto gallery files and download files are kept in two separate directory trees on the server.  A nice feature is that optionally they can be on separate servers.  The gallery can be on your usual web server while downloads reside on a different server possibly better suited to handle large data capacity and the bandwidth of large downloads.  The download directory tree structure is a duplicate of the gallery directory.  You add a prefix to file name of different versions of a file that you place for download.  For instance 091009-1234.jpg might be the gallery image.  In the same directory structure under downloads I might place full_091009-1234.tif and web_091009-1234.jpg for giving the user the ability to optionally select a full res tiff versus a web res jpeg to purchase/download.  The user never sees the file prefixes until they download a file.  If you leave one of these versions out of the download directory then that version won't be shown as available to the user.  You can have as many different versions (size, file format, color space... pretty much whatever) as you care to create.  I use Photoshop actions and ABetterFinderRenamer droplets to batch create the various versions of images for upload to the server. 


Support for IPTC is pretty good.  Adobe XMP support has improved but it's still fairly lame.  Basically it means it won't choke when it encounters it.  For example, IPTC limits the length of some fields more than the corresponding Adobe field.  For creator I enter "Bob Smith / Accurate Image" in Bridge.  That's one character too long for IPTC and LightBox would shorten it.  Not any more.  This is an area that was improving and I may not have the absolute latest version installed.  Upgrading ANY server software is not like hitting the upgrade button on your desktop.  You don't do it until there's a very compelling reason to do so.  If you've done much customization that can often break in any upgrade.

Here's a screenshot of the IPTC configuration pane in the admin area on my site:

http://www.accurateimage.org/temp/lboxIPTC.jpg

LightBoxPhoto comes with excellent "help" documentation compared to similar programs.  That will probably answer many of your questions.  Here's a link that will show you the admin's help documents on my system:

http://www.accurateimage.org/box4/help.htm

If you contact LightBoxPhoto, they'll give you access to a demo admin area where you can poke around and try the various controls.

While you can edit/apply metadata within the LightboxPhoto admin interface, to me it's far easier to use a "real" DAM program for that task while accessing files on the server.  Issues like this are why I like having the server sitting in my office where files can be easily maintained.

The directory tree displayed is a strict folder structure.  This is a bone of contention for me as all of my pages are "private".  Password protected areas are handled differently and the directory tree is not displayed as thoroughly.  I don't think there's an option to have "virtual" copies where an image appears in more than one folder while it exists on the server in only one real instance.  I believe ImageFolio did have this feature but I never used it as the implementation was too impractical to maintain on a large database of images.

One point worth noting about a key difference between ImageFolio and LightBoxPhoto... with ImageFolio you could go in and edit any code you wanted in the program (maybe that's changed in more recent versions).  That was great for someone with the skills to modify the inner workings of the program.  It's a support nightmare.  When a problem arises it may well have been caused by someone accidently deleting one comma amongst thousands of lines of code.  LightBoxPhoto is highly user customizable.  You can edit all sorts of templates and CSS files to alter what it looks like, but the core PHP code is locked with Zend Optimizer such that only LightBoxPhoto staff can access and alter that code.

hope that helps...

Bob

[peterkrogh]

Bob,
Thanks again for the thorough rundown.
A few more questions, if you don't mind.

Can the program see and search on ratings?

Can you export some kind of XML document of any lightbox grouping or user tags that might have been generated so that it could be injected back into the main catalog?

Can you offer a CV of search terms so that a user would know what's in the collection, or does this navigation have to be done by folder tree? I'd want to be able to say "here are all the shoots I've done for you" or "I have pictures in this collection of the following subject matter".

As to the nature of the server, it sounds like you are implementing your own. Any idea if this could be done with an installation of the program on my GoDaddy site, with the files locally stored on an HP MediaSmart server, or would the photos need to be on the same server as the database installation?  It sounds like storing the files locally offers a better way to add metadata to them, since they can be accessed directly, rather than through FTP.

Peter

[BobSmith]

1.  It could be set to see and search on the priority field in IPTC (same as labels in EM).  It doesn't see or search on Adobe ratings.

2.  Not that I know of.

3.  There is no CV of search terms but you could possibly build something like that from MySQL.  It would probably be easier to do from your desktop DAM application.  What users seem to find handy is that you can optionally make various metadata fields display as links.  For instance someone could find one image with the keyword "beach" and click on that to see every image with that contains the same keyword.  You can also use the lightbox function to find and send a collection of images to someone.  That function works best when the person you are sending it to creates and account for themselves and logs on.  Once they've done that they can save multiple lightboxes.  So any given user can save their own custom collections of images.   Its also possible for users passing lightboxes back and forth to "comment" on specific images.  Its a neat feature but my users don't seem to take advantage of it much.  How many images can be stored in a lightbox and how long a lightbox is stored is configurable in the admin portion of the software.  The default settings are quite conservative but can easily be changed.

4.  The server requirements for running Lightbox are pretty common except for possibly Zend Optimizer.  I'm not sure how common that one is among various hosting companies.  Everything else  required is very commonly available.  You could host the gallery on someone like GoDaddy and have the download files on a local FTP server.  Altering metadata on your locally stored files would affect what the user that downloads an image gets but it wouldn't have any effect on the images displayed in the gallery.

This thread has caused me to revisit some features of LightboxPhoto that I've not used a great deal.  I stumbled over one this morning that I can't believe I had been missing.  It makes displaying IPTC metadata in custom ways far easier.  I also think that it may be possible to have one image exist in more than one navigation folder (virtual copy).  I need to test this some more.  I also went back and looked at ImageFolio again.  The parent company has a new name but it's the same people that I dealt with before.  The software seems relatively little changed (commerce version) from what I was actively running three years ago.

Bob Smith

[aniemann]

Hi Bob

If you don't mind, what were your problems with ImageFolio? I was just now (literally ..weird how that goes) looking at their site thinking it looked like possibly good stuff. Price was right, interfaced with a SQL database, unlimited users, admin access controls etc.etc.

You imply customer support problems -does that mean software didn't work as described, sporadic problems or?

And did you try other databases such as Cumulus or Portfolio?

Thanks so much, Andy

[BobSmith]

The software mostly performed as expected.  But with any complex piece of software there's bound to be niggling bugs.  Whether they affect you are not is up to your particular needs.  It's been so long since I used it extensively that I can't recall the precise problems.  The main issue was that support was pretty much non-existent even to persons fully willing to pay for custom mods to fix some operational glitch.  It was not uncommon to wait weeks or months for a response if you even got one at all.  There were numerous customers... particularly those with the highest end commerce package... complaining of similar issues on their forum... many, many posts from a variety of users.  We (the customers) got quite good at helping each other.  Even the moderators of the forum (other customers) had a hard time getting any sort of communication from anyone at Imagefolio.  That could be why the current link on their site to a "message board" takes you instead to a page where you can buy.

The posts are long gone but just reading the thread titles here will give you an idea:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080102233245/ubb.imagefolio.com/ubbthreads/postlist.php?Cat=0&Board=IFC

I pulled that particular page up at random because that was a time and category where I participated quite a bit.

The commerce package sat without significant upgrades for ages.  It's currently listed a 4.x but I think it skipped version 2 and 3.  I know it skipped at least one of those while the lesser "Pro" version was getting some needed interface tweaking.  I found some announcements of v2 of the Commerce version on archived pages that were at least two years before an upgrade of any sort actually appeared.

Neither Cumulos or Portfolio are in the same league with either LightBoxPhoto or ImageFolio.  The former (from what very little I know of them) are closer to true DAM applications.  LightBoxPhoto and ImageFolio are primarily web galleries and shopping carts with a few DAM features added in.  I wouldn't want to manage a large database of images from either but they do a good job of presenting a searchable archive images that has been built elsewhere to a client base that needs to access via a web browser and do basic searching, browsing, buying, downloading.

At the time I made the switch, LightboxPhoto was substantially more feature rich than ImageFolio for a similar price.  All versions of LightBoxPhoto were MySQL based.  It was a fairly substantial extra cost option to ImageFolio.  That really affects the performance of larger collections.  LightboxPhoto has continued to improve over the time frame that I've owned it and is still actively being developed.  From what I see on Imagefolio's site there's relatively little changed in the way of features from the 1.x version that I still have on my server.  It has a new "skin" and a new website and company name but I'm not seeing much of anything on the feature list that's not in what I've got.  One of the "big" feature changes to the Pro version was the ability to choose and edit skins more easily.  I assume they've ported that over to commerce but I'm not sure that basic functionality has changed much.  Other than the database stats at the top and a couple of different icons, the admin interface looks virtually identical to what mine looks like from 2004

Bob Smith

[BobSmith]

Here's a thread on another forum that's a detailed discussion of Lightroom and ImageFolio.  It's from 2007.  You might have to register to see it all... I'm not sure.  I'm still registered on that site so it shows up in full for me, but I'm no longer a paid member.

http://www.prophotohome.com/forum/photoshop-other-image-applications/72146-help-dam-software.html

Bob Smith

[aniemann]

Thanks so much Bob, that was great ...Andy

[BobSmith]

here's one page from the ImageFolio forum that is archived.  It's where a number of us "found" LightboxPhoto and is a discussion comparing/considering them.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061018022136/http://ubb.imagefolio.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=0&Number=3235&an=0&page=1

Bob

[aniemann]

Hi Bob, thanks for that last extra post, which brings up another question:

Reading that last set of forum posts, it appears that Lightbox is not open to users working on its code. ImageFolio on the other hand boasts about the openess of their PHP based DAM. Is that really the case? It strikes me that I might lilke the ability of being able to hire a local programmer to fix or upgrade my DAM should its company decide to wander off in a southerly direction.

Thanks, Andy

[BobSmith]

ImageFolio is mostly Perl and CGI scripts.  Looking at the source code on their current demo pages that appears to still be the case.  I would assume that MySQL versions make use of at least some PHP but I don't know that for a fact.  In the versions I had, yes, the Perl/CGI code is fully editable.

All versions of LightBoxPhoto use PHP and MySQL.  They are highly customizable but a user can't edit the most basic core code.  It's locked using Zend Optimizer.  I've not found that to be a limitation at all... and Zend Optimizer offers some performance advantages as well.  If you truly need modifications beyond what you can do, LightBoxPhoto will do custom mods.  I've not had occasion to need them but I've heard several users who have say that they were done promptly at a very reasonable costs.

LightBoxPhoto sites are more customizable than they might first appear through their admin demo.  The admin area gets you to several key html or css template files that can be edited right through that interface.  But there are many more editable files that can be accessed in the actual site files...and this includes some PHP files that have more to do with data display than data manipulation.  They make use of the Smarty Template Engine for some mods.  There's a page on the Lightbox site that thoroughly details exactly what each tpl file controls and what can be edited.  I bring that up because its a major time save during the process of trying to do a custom mod and you won't get help like that from ImageFolio.

Bob