Product Reviews

Pixaria was created to solve a specific need - setting up an online photo library for a website without the pain and hassle of writing your own server-side solution. The upshot is a set of PHP scripts that the developer claims sorts out the hassles of making a decent gallery-style library that includes user accounts, tag-based searching and full e-commerce abilities.

This isn't the kind of regular standalone application that normally appears in these pages and yes, you have to run this on a website with PHP and MySQL support. But anyone who has attempted to do this or even just tried forcing one of the free image gallery scripts into behaving should know how useful this can be.

Its developer, Pixaria Gallery, also claims that it can handle multiple users, both as clients and photographers, and provides flexible control over quotes and image pricing. Also, the developer says that it helps protect copyright and intellectual property, includes an e-card system, and allows for physical products.

With promises like this there are two obvious questions. Does it match the developer's promises? And how complex is it to install? On the whole we found that it wasn't too taxing to install if one has a little understanding of PHP and can follow basic instructions. This basically involves editing marked items in one PHP file and setting up the MySQL side of things by importing a supplied SQL config file. After that it's a matter of clicking on a few links to run some update scripts.

If that sounds too complex, Pixaria Gallery promises to do the technical installation process for you. That's certainly rather

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more than you get from any alternative we've seen. We did have some trouble fine-tuning the admin account without locking ourselves out, so do make sure you follow the instructions carefully.

The software seems to be impressively comprehensive. Once installed, you'll need to explore the features and options. But in short you can upload your images, define galleries and pricing, set up user and access rights, and all the rest from your admin account. To add images you use a script-driven file upload form, either one at a time or in a zip, tar or gzip archive - or by placing images into an incoming directory, using an FTP application. We found the web-driven uploading functional though not quick, and limited to 2MB files unless your server is tweaked to allow larger items.

For bulk uploads the FTP approach is really the most sensible option. Setting up albums and thumbnails locally before uploading them is possible; this is recommended if you want to deal with very large graphics, as the server scripts may not be able to process them for you.

Visitors can set up their own lightboxes for picking and organising images they track down. You can also set up certain users as photographers, giving them the ability to add images to the library as well. And if you use Aperture, a plug-in is available to take images directly from your own archives.

Operations, such as uploading and setting up galleries, are fairly clearly presented, but they can involve a number of steps. Because of this, as you work, you may need to ask questions. Fortunately, the Pixaria site's online documentation is well structured and contains useful tips, while both existing users and Pixaria Gallery are available via the forums at pixaria.com.

Pixaria is no mere web-photo gallery; it really is a mature, more or less, ready-to-run tool for organising, marketing and selling image content. You will need some technical savvy to keep it running smoothly even if you have it set up in the first place. Because of that you should work through things logically and step-by-step.

But despite these caveats, Pixaria is impressive. Devote time to learning and using it properly and you'll get a lot out of it.