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podoc:installation_gotchas

Installation Gotchas

Photo Organizer isn't the easiest tool to install successfully. While v2.32+ has a new installer that makes things a lot simpler, PO has several dependencies that need to be set up independently.

Database Problems

This is perhaps the most complicated part to set up, as there's no way for Photo Organizer to work around this or automate it.

Most installation problems are due to default database permissions. See Configuring PostgreSQL for examples of valid configurations.

Configuration File Problems

As of v2.32, System configuration defaults are kept in a different file from site-specific configuration. The site-specific file contains the minimum number of options to get a new site up and running, but it is possible an upgrade may cause an existing setting to break.

Older versions used a buggy installer that often resulted in incomplete configuration files. The most common symptom was that, after installing, you run into problems creating new albums, folders, and/or users (returning SQL errors).

Colorspace/Profile problems

If you want to take advantage of camera profiles and/or AdobeRGB support, you'll need to ensure that ImageMagick (and your raw tool) are compiled with LittleCMS support. There is no direct way to query ImageMagick to find out, but here is a fairly foolproof way:

[pizza@lunchbox ~]$ ldd /usr/bin/convert
      libMagick.so.9 => /usr/lib/libMagick.so.9 
      libtiff.so.3 => /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3 
      [... lots of stuff ...]
      libcms.so.1 => /usr/lib/liblcms.so.1 <<<<<
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If you see the above line (or something similar) then your ImageMagick installation supports color profile manipulation.

Fedora Core 4 and 5 ImageMagick RPMs are not built with libcms support, but Fedora Core 6 apparently is.

dcraw is typically built with profile support. If you run dcraw, you should see output similar to this:

[pizza@heatwave ~]$ dcraw

Raw Photo Decoder "dcraw" v8.38
by Dave Coffin, dcoffin a cybercom o net

Usage:  dcraw [options] file1 file2 ...

Valid options:
-v        Print verbose messages
[ ... ]
-o <file> Apply output ICC profile from file
-p <file> Apply camera ICC profile from file or "embed"

If you see these two options in the output, your dcraw installation supports profile mangling.

PHP configuration problems

magic_quotes_runtime and magic_quotes_gpc will break Photo Organzier. v2.32 added code to detect and correct around the problems caused by this, but there's no guarantee that this will work in all cases. Unless you need magic_quotes on for some other (broken!) PHP application, turn it off in your php.ini configuration file.

Another common problem is that the max upload size is limited to something relatively small. The post_max_size and upload_max_filesize should be large enough to handle your typical image upload. Also ensure file_uploads and tmp_dir are enabled and set correctly in your php.ini file.

display_errors must be disabled; it not only breaks some Photo Organizer pages (that shouldn't be emitting warnings) but is also a security risk and should never be enabled on a production system.

log_errors should be on if something goes wrong and you need to figure out what.

memory_limit should be at least 32M, or things might just break, especially for large bulk uploads. If you didn't compile PHP with memory limit support, then ignore this. :)

Lastly, disable safe_mode as it is simply too restrictive for Photo Organizer to work properly. Work is underway to allow this, though.

Web Server problems

The web server needs to be set up properly to serve (and execute) PHP pages. Configuring it is beyond the scope of this document.

That said, please ensure that you do not have an overly-restrictive LimitRequestBody directive in your server configuration, as this can restrict you from uploading images.

podoc/installation_gotchas.txt · Last modified: 2006/11/27 17:03 by pizza