Is there a PHP image-management system that has a fully customizeable front-end?

Question

I am searching for an image management system, based in PHP, that allows for organizing images into galleries/categories, but that has a fully customizable front-end. For example, I would like full control over what elements are on the front-end, so that I can design the gallery pages to be without any admin access or extra meta-data.

I am currently trying to create a theme using Gallery 3.0. This is a great image manager, but I am hitting some walls with customizing the front-end to be exactly as I wish.

Any advice would be appreciated! Thanks

Answer 1

This really sounds like a Drupal site to me. I'm sure plenty of other solutions are out there, even other open ended CMS products. But Drupal would be my suggestion, because I know for certain it has all of the features your describing and a large user base that can provide support.

Answer 2

Check out Plogger

Answer 3

Several sites I built use Gallery as the back end and then I custom-rolled frontends using php and Jquery. It gives you 100% control to do all sorts of crazy stuff on the front-end while maintaining the superior back-end interface that Gallery gives you, without the need to migrate the pictures you already have uploaded. Conceivably, you could use any gallery front-end system JQuery offers, or just do the old standby table with photos in it. One of my sites uses a slideshow-like interaction where it shows a thumbnail preview of the next photo overlayed on the corner of the full-size current photo, with ajax interactions to go forward or back.

The only gotcha is figuring out which DB fields have the proper names for your application. After some simple trial and error, it becomes easy to build queries to get any possible combination from the DB that Gallery populates.