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zpu - ZenPhoto file upload utility

Dreamhost now provide ZenPhoto, an online image gallery software, as a one click install application, as the ZenPhoto developers proudly announce. I decided to give it a try to host my personal pics, and I definitely recommend it, the most outstanding feature being its unbloatedness (see demo site). It’s just what it is supposed to be - “a simpler web photo gallery” as the official webpage of ZenPhoto states.

However, the one-click install at DreamHost suffers from a severe problem which is that they do not provide ftp/scp access to upload pictures. This means that uploading a huge photo album is *painfully* slow a process, since the only available option is to manually upload each file using HTML forms.

In my free time, I’ve created an application to upload pics there, as a way to exercise my python programming skills and as my first peek at PyGTK programming. In case you give it a try, the program requires the PyGTK and mechanize python modules be installed in the system. It has only been tested on my gentoo linux box. Should work on other linux distros and bsd, probably also for mac os. Will *not* work on Microsoft Windows as it is (contributions to this regard will be welcome). UPDATE: peter at majorsilence dot com has kindly provided a patch that makes it work on windows.

An option to overcome the need for such a software utility is to install ZenPhoto normally (as opposed to using DreamHost’s one-click installation) and to upload the files using any scp client (e.g. WinSCP).

Disclaimer: this software is in ultra initial development state and may do horrible things to your albums. Software comes with no warranty. Please check the attached license terms.

Download zpu (ZenPhoto Uploader) version 0.1 here.

Download zpu (ZenPhoto Uploader) version 0.2 here.

Please leave a comment here if you download it - whether successful or not.

This was written by josep. Posted on Friday, June 6, 2008, at 12:03 am. Filed under dreamhost, free software, publishing, web sites, zenphoto. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback.

4 Comments

  1. Chris Fesler wrote:

    Works great. For reference, in ubuntu 08.04 I had to run:

    sudo apt-get install python-mechanize python-gtk2 python-glade2

    Thank you!

    Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 12:16 am | Permalink
  2. josep wrote:

    Glad to know it was useful to someone else :)

    Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 7:18 am | Permalink
  3. Peter wrote:

    Thanks for the program. It is exactly what I was looking for. I have patched it so it will also work on Windows (http://www.majorsilence.com/apps/zpu/zpu.diff).

    Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 5:34 am | Permalink
  4. josep wrote:

    Thanks! I’ve gone ahead and assumed I am allowed to incorporate your code, and released it under v0.2.

    Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 10:01 am | Permalink

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