Photo Gallery

[bob garbados]

I'm looking for thoughts on photo galleries and security/performance
implications... I'm working on an asp.net site in vb that will include an
updateable photo gallery that will display thumbnails on a page and clicking
on the thumbnails would pop open another window with the full-sized image.
The site needs a form that provides for uploading photos.

The photo gallery can be limited to a certain number of photos if need be.
What are the implications of storing the images in a sql 2000 database vs.
the web server? Does anybody have experience with this type of
functionality? Thanks.

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

I created a similar web site. It's certainly feasible.
You need to stay aware of the fact that some photos can be huge, which can
cause bandwidth problems if you're not careful about building in
scalability.

Here's an article that should be useful to you:
http://steve.orr.net/content/asp200307so_f.asp

 

[bob garbados]

Thanks Steve,

You referred me to this article in response to a post of mine last week and
it was a big help. I'm fairly new to .NET and I got stuck trying to resize
images and display thumbnails. My page seemed to load fairly slow so I
wanted to look at saving the files to the web server as well. I'm assuming
that performance will be faster if the images live on the web server but
that it's a better security model to allow the user to update the database
rather than have access to the web server.

As far as huge photos are concerned, I can check the size at upload time and
not allow an upload if images are over a certain size.

How can I ensure that I save the right thumbnail? I found that the
System.Drawing.Image.GetThumbnailImage method will return a thumbnail
embedded into the image if one exists. That thumbnail is usually pretty
tiny.

Can you lend insight into how I would go about displaying thumbnails? There
can be 1 image or 20 images and I want to save a thumbnail version of the
photo at upload time and display all of the thumbnails on one page of the
website. Can I do this with a repeater or datagrid or datalist? I've
always used a repeater to display data from a database because of it's
simplicity.

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

Well that's a lot of questions.
Here's an alternative to the GetThumbnailImage function so you don't have to
deal with its limitations:
http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/22079

As far as displaying the thumbnails in an organized way, I experimented with
repeaters and other such techniques, but ultimately went with a Table
control. The process is a bit more manual but it gave me all the
functionality I could ever want, and it's quite logical and intuitive.
I basically just looped through my images and dropped each one into a new
table cell object.

--
I hope this helps,
Steve C. Orr, MCSD, MVP
http://Steve.Orr.net