···Oh·yeah·btw·he·takes·photos·too··· By Caro Spark

OpenPhoto is a open-source project that aim to host your photos in the cloud, but in a way that let you control your data using Amazon services contrarily to Google Picasa or Yahoo Flickr. The second interesting point is the low price of the storage and transfer on Amazon. Main developer and OpenPhoto’s creator Jaisen Matha left its job at Yahoo and raised 25000 $ to work full-time to develop this project. You can see all the deliverable promised on the funding page. Jaisen plans to developed an hosted version of OpenPhoto, and promises it’ll be possible to switch back and forth between the two versions.

As a casual photographer, I’m interested by this project for the hosting solution it provides, and the way the project is driven, as I didn’t know funding support (at the same time I discover the funding of Novacut). As of today, the project is working (you can upload photos, view them, add comments, …) but it is still young, so it is evolving at a fast pace (for instance Hub Figuière is working on local storage and MySQL support) and you’re likely to find bugs here and there; you’re encouraged to submit them.

As said, the project is very young, and it’ll take some times to compete with a service like Flickr.

Setup

As often, there are instructions to host the web service on a Apache server (there is even a vhost configuration ready), but nothing for others webserver, so I just wanted to share my setup to host OpenPhoto on a Cherokee installation.

I assume you have already retrieved the source code on github as explained in the documentation. First I suggest you to create a dedicated vhost with the document root set as explain.

You need to create three rules:

• an rule for “php extension“, with a handler to route php to fastcgi (you use the wizard for that).
• a “Not file exists” rule with an internal redirection handler:
  ^/(.*)\?*$ => index.php?__route__=/$1
• A default rule, with a “List and Send” handler

When you connect to the vhost, you should reach the wizard to enter the amazon credentials and finish the installation.

Edit:  There is now a guide available for cherokee webserver on the documentation of openphoto done by myself