Web Gallery with Hierachical Categories, or Online Database

[stahl]

Hello,
I am coming back to where I started with IMatch almost two decades ago: I have this IMatch database containing 2500 reproductions of paintings, set up as a catalogue of an artist's works. The database includes loads of hierarchical categories such as motive, style, technique, dominant colour, size range, year etc. with their respective and many subcategories. The idea of this kind of setup had been to have IMatch 3 create a deeply structured html site to hand out to people on CD-ROM so they will find their way around without dealing with a database. The old IM3 script does not run any more.

Many years later, I am looking for a way to present this catalogue again, preferably online. The idea is that visitors can easily find e. g. all paintings from 1938, all portraits or all watercolour paintings. What I need is a website with hierarchical keywords/tags/categories, which will display the XMP title and description next to the image and where I can easily import and update data from IMatch. I'd also be open to an online database of some sort, as long as it is not to troublesome to set up and update for me and is easy to use for visitors. The catalogue must not be public, but a reduced version should be later on.

Any ideas how I can get this going?

I know I could use IMatch Anywhere on a cloud PC, but this would only allow two simultaneous users with the home edition, five with pro. Flickr and Smugmug do not seem to have hierarchical keywords and, it seems, no functionality to import the catalogue structure. Or do they?

Thanks, Stef

[lbo]

there are only few working web gallery solutions available so this might be "difficult".

Piwigo has hierarchical albums but AFAIK does not use hierarchical keywords.

I doubt that Zenphoto, Lychee, Chevereto, Koken (still supported?), MediaGoblin etc. are much better regarding Metadata.

[Jingo]

Hi Stef - you might try my gallery app which is integrated into IMatch.  https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=9370.0 - the Javascript should be editable to allow for hierarchical keywords though you can also write the hierarchical keywords to a different IPTC field and use that as well.  Enjoy!

[Mario]

Have you considered just creating a nice looking Photo Album in PDF format using IMatch Design & Print?
This gives you full control over the layout and looks, the metadata you want to include and the resulting PDF can be viewed on any operating system and device.

[stahl]

Thanks for your replies, Ibo, Jingo and Mario!
This seems more difficult than I expected ... I was hoping for a simple export function to one (or many) of the existing web gallery providers without me scripting and setting up servers. I did not quite expect hierarchical categories/keywords to be such a problem. PDF does not seem to do the job since I need to have the images in multiple categories (i. e. year, technique, style, motive ...) wich would blow up the catalogue to several thousand pages, I suppose, all the more so if I want to have a nice large picture of the painting.

Maybe I need to think more of a web cataloge or web shop host than of an image gallery.

[Mario]

I was hoping for a simple export function to one (or many) of the existing web gallery providers

Yeah, well, the problem is that each of these providers have different programming interfaces, import formats etc.
Some even want money if you want to use their API (e.g. smugmug) or the integration is complex and requires me to setup and maintain a server just for authentication purposes (no authentication possible directly from a client application for security reasons) - Facebook, Twitter etc.

Most people share photos via Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram these days. Or maybe make a slide show and upload to YouTube.
For all that you can usually just drag photos from IMatch to the browser to upload them.

Hierarchical concepts (in form of keywords or categories) are not something many of these vendors support.
Most target consumer users with rather simple requirements. Some kind of albums is usually what you get, and maybe a timeline.

IMatch once had a gallery builder feature which could create HTML galleries on-the-fly, including a hierarchical navigation.
But there is virtually zip demand for such a solution these days, and it would be costly and time-consuming to create a new app and maintain for maybe 3 - 10 users who would ever use this.

If your server runs WordPress, there is a good change that there is a free or paid "photo gallery" add-on you can install.

[lbo]

This seems more difficult than I expected ... I was hoping for a simple export function to one (or many) of the existing web gallery providers without me scripting and setting up servers

If you don't want to operate your own server, Piwigo is also available hosted: https://piwigo.com/

Piwigo imports (flat) keywords without special effort (no "scripting").

You can use one hierarchical property to be mirrored in the exported directory structure. This will be used by Piwigo as "album name".

Piwigo searches can use this hierarchical "Album name", author, date (range), keywords, and one more term to be chosen from title, description or file name.

I can't imagine this being insufficient to quickly select from just 2000 images. And I don't expect many users being capable of doing more complex searches.

I rather guess most will type "John Doe 1934 landscape" in the general search field and then look at the results.

Oliver

[stahl]

The hosted version of Piwigo does indeed seem very interesting. Thanks for pointing me there!

[jch2103]

If your server runs WordPress, there is a good change that there is a free or paid "photo gallery" add-on you can install.

Unfortunately, most of the 'photo gallery' add-ons for WordPress that I've seen (free ones, anyway) are pretty lacking for things like keywords and other metadata.