I looked at many options for this.  The easiest solution seems like it would be to use an existing online photo sharing site, like Flickr or Windows Live Spaces.  I looked at four or five of these, and none of them really offered what I was looking for.  And what was that, exactly?

Access control. I want to be able to upload a bunch of photos for the general public to see, but have more that friends and family can log in to view. I want to be able to assign users into groups and set some photos visible only to certain groups.

Tagging. Some existing services have limited support for tagging. I really like Windows Photo Gallery’s hierarchical tagging. I wanted some way to bring this into my online photo gallery.

(Hold on, why don’t I just use Facebook? It seems to fit the bill so far. Well, how about these…)

Download the full-size, original photos. Users who have accounts should be able to download the full photo for archival or printing, not just a scaled-down web version. And I’d like the photos on the web site itself to also be reasonably high resolution… no 640×480 junk.

Easily managed appearance and organization of photos. Specifically, I want photos to be presented chronologically, and I don’t want to have to do some tedeous rearranging or even be sure to upload photos in the correct order to get them to appear in the order I want.

After dismissing the idea of using an existing online service, I thought about writing my own. I started working on my own online photo application. It was to support everything I mentioned above, and even support importing XMP metadata information saved by Windows Photo Gallery and expose the hierarchical tag tree for users to browse. I made some good progress on this application during the previous summer, but I ended up dropping it because I simply do not have the time to devote to it.

However, all of that effort was not lost. I finally settled on Gallery (what a name), an open-source PHP based photo gallery web app. I extended the metadata module provided with it to support reading XMP metadata from Windows Photo Gallery (tags, corrected dates, and captions), using code I had written for this that was originally intended to be used in my own photo application. This makes uploading photos that I have already organized in Windows Photo Gallery very easy for me. I made some other minor tweaks to the app, but now it is up and running at gallery.aaron-kelley.net.

Here’s what you need to know if you want to check out my photo gallery!

I decided not to expose tag information directly for privacy reasons. However, you can search on the tags. My tags are pretty detailed, so if you put in a location, person, or whatever in the search box, you may be able to find photos.

Personal photos (that is, photos of me, friends, family, and so on) are only visible to people who have an account and sign in. If you register for an account, it has to be verified by me before it becomes active. I will only allow friends and family to register accounts. People without accounts can still view my more “general” photos.

Account holders may also download the original version of any photo they have access to. Other web users may view the rather generously sized 1024×768 versions. (I thought about going even higher than that, but decided that it’d make the page bigger than some users’ web browser windows. I’ll check out the Google Analytics data on this after a while, and raise it if it looks like it won’t bug very many people.)

At this moment, I’ve only uploaded photos from the last two months. I will be adding more in the coming days and weeks, starting from now and going backwards. Photos marked “NEW” on the site are photos that I added within the last 7 days. (After I run out of digital photos, I hope to digitize some “traditional photos” and make them available. But I have lots of digital photos that I have yet to even sort through and tag for myself.)

Windows Photo Gallery stores tag information directly in the files you are tagging, when possible. For instance, when tagging JPEG files, the tags are stored in the JPEGs using XMP. Also, if you modify other information about the files (such as the date/time a photo was taken), that information is stored in the file if possible.

In some cases, the information cannot be stored in the file itself; for instance, if the file is marked “read only,” or if the file format does not support metadata (PNG, AVI, etc.). In this case, Windows Photo Gallery still allows you to do anything you could to a file that it could store the information in, only, it stores the information in its own little private database. This is transparent to the user.

If you want to move your “gallery” to a different machine, and your gallery consists only of JPEG images, you can probably just copy them all to the new machine, and Windows Photo Gallery will automatically index them and rebuild its list of tags. However, if you have other types of files in your gallery, the information will not be carried along with these files and you’ll have to re-tag them. Ugh.

I’ve been looking into migrating the Windows Photo Gallery database. There doesn’t seem to be any supported way to do this (someone please correct me if I’m wrong).

The database itself is easy to find — it is the Pictures.pd4 file, found in AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery in your Windows profile folder. So, to migrate the database, it should be as simple as moving this file to the new machine, and making sure that the paths to all of the files in your gallery remain the same, right?

Well, after trying this and running Windows Photo Gallery, we come up with a curious dialog box.

Note that the folder it is complaining about is actually present on the machine.

Here, you have some options. If you click on “Find the folder,” and browse for it, you might end up with a duplicate of every file appearing in your gallery (and the folder is listed under “Folders” on the left twice, with no way to remove either of them). If you click on “Remove the folder,” all of the files in your gallery disappear, and your tag information is lost (even if you manually add the folder back). And if you click on “Cancel,” everything works great, all of the files appear and all of the tag information appears to have been migrated succesfully… Except, this dialog reappears every time you run Windows Photo Gallery.

In trying to figure out a way to either migrate the information without causing this dialog to appear, or to figure out why Windows Photo Gallery doesn’t seem to like the Pictures folder even though it has the same path as before, I set up two identical galleries on two separate machines and compared their Pictures.pd4 files. Skipping a lot of the details, I did eventually stumble on the key difference.

Windows Photo Gallery is checking your volume information (volume label and serial number) and storing it in its database; it is then using this to verify that the files are on the same drive that they were before. If you move the database to a different machine, the volume serial number is not the same, so it throws up the error we saw above. You can’t just edit the volume serial number in the Pictures.pd4 file to match the new one, though, Windows Photo Gallery is able to detect that the file has been tampered with (you’d have to go fix some other checksum stuff to get that to work). The easiest thing to do is just to change the volume serial number on your “destination” machine to match the one of the “source” machine. You can do that with this SysInternals utility, VolumeID.

So, migrating your Windows Photo Gallery database, step-by-step:

• Copy all of the files in your gallery to the new machine. Make sure the path to them remains the same as it was on the old machine.
• Copy the Pictures.pd4 file to the new machine.
• Change the volume ID of the C: drive (and any other drives with folders indexed by Windows Photo Gallery) on the new machine to be the same as on the old machine, using VolumeID. (Reboot for the changes to be visible, before running Windows Photo Gallery.)

Note that Windows Live Photo Gallery can be migrated similarly.