email to photo gallery

When you just can’t wait to share the moment

An implementation of this concept(with video ability also) is available for testing here

Often while travelling you come accross situations which are worthy of being shared and sometimes you wish you could do it instantly rather than wait to find a docking station. Well it’s possible.

We were recently contemplating what would be the simplest solution to do this and here’s the concoction we came up with:

1. ofcourse a mms enabled camera phone and the hosting to run your gallery
2. procmail to catch the mail and process it
3. metamail to extract the image attachments
4. mojomail to maintain a optional distribution list
5. a nifty little php script to do the gallery jhingbang

I wrote the recipe for procmail and wired it with mojomail to give it a test run. It runs real sweet! Mojomail rocks because dadamail doesn’t have a dada_send.pl or atleast it’s too damn buggy also once you get popular for good photography your fans spread the word and you need a robust list management s/w to take care of the subscriptions.

The gallery script which we wrote is pretty basic as in it takes the images from where the procmail processing dumps them, generates the thumbnails and displays them on a page as clickables. I also figured a way to add descriptions to the images extracting it from the message body. Some mobile service providers tend to add there own images to the mms well that’s easily managed, in the gallery script just suppress the operator logos.

This is work in progress and I’m looking for a demo server where I can set it all up as right now it’s on a clients server and we can’t really push traffic onto his server 😉 ! Request you to give suggestions as to how we can further improve this application.