Import/conversion from existing photo db to EE

[garyinslo]

Hi,

I have been using an obscure db driven photo album for a few years now which has over 2,400 images in it. Most of the images are old family slides spanning from the mid-fifties to the mid-eighties and are likely quite boring to anyone but our family. That's beside the point here though.

This old system has adequately served my needs, but is quite crude compared to EE, especially in terms of the administration side. I like EE a lot and have begun the process of populating it with all the existing images. It is quite tedious to do one photo at a time.

I know my way around php/mysql quite well as php web development is my profession. I'm sure I could come up with a script to do a db data import from the existing database into EE's database, however importing the actual images and performing the necessary thumb/microthumb creation could potentially prove to be a problem.

I'm not worried about exif data as all of the old images are simple jpegs from slide scans with no readable exif data anyway. So I would dump all these fields as default 'unknown' information.

The biggest hitch with the data import is that there is a table in my old db for 'names' which contain a list of people's names in each image. This allows for searches based on names which is almost a necessity for family photos. I've been using categories in EE for this and it has been working ok, even though I suppose it is stretching the category's real purpose.

To summarize, I need to
- import data from an existing db into EE's db
- concurrently reference the physicalimage file locations during the process
- concurrently create thumb/microthumb files

I administer the server(s) one of which EE is hosted, so I am able to do as much tinkering as possible.

Any suggestions/cautions on doing a mass conversion? Have you seen this done before? It will save hours/days/months of manual work if I can do this.

URLs:
Old photo album:
http://www.gedberg.org/photos/

New EE photo album:
http://photos.gedberg.org/

Thanks for a great application and any input you can provide.

[Pekka]

I'm afraid this would be quite impossible work to code a converter without knowing anything about data structure of the old app. Converters are hard to code in all cases. But if you can make database dump of the old database and mail it to me, I can see how it is built and if we are lucky some rudimentary converter can be written. But I'd like to say that this effort is worthwhile if it saves weeks or months - but saving hours or days, well in that case coding is slower.

Also I can not tell exactly when this would be ready - depends on lots of things.

Thumb files are best to do with rethumbnailer tool.

[garyinslo]

Thanks Pekka for the quick response. Considering my crazy schedule, it's taken a couple weeks to do only 164 out of 2,419 total images, so this would definitely save me weeks or months of work. Then I can start posting my current photos. :)

See your pm for a link to my db schema.

Thanks again and Best Regards...

[tommykjensen]

Pekka, I just have to say that You are one of the most helpfull people I have encountered on the web. :D :D :D

Not only do You create this brilliant photo album You even offer help with converting from another photo album to EE. Not many would do that unless they needed that conversion themselves. Because as You say converting one database structure to another can be a huge job.

[okapi]

i absolutely agree with thommy. you are a great man. you're doing a great job, and you are helping wherever you can. it's fantastic.
me too, i'm very thankful for your kind support!