Photozen is my ongoing pet project. I got interested in digital photography at a hobbyist level in 2001. I got an Olympus C-700 Ultra Zoom for Christmas that year.

It didn't take long before I wanted an easy way to post my pictures online. I was already fairly accomplished at building web sites using PHP, so I tackled the problem from that quarter. My first stab at a photo album system was extremely simple. An image naming scheme was used to generate titles for the pictures, and thumbnails were generated on the fly, which were linked to a user defined image size.

This system was clearly deficient for many reasons. Mostly, it was difficult to import the images into the system, as each image had to be renamed according to a scheme of underscores and carets. The web page was nothing interesting to look at, either, so I found that people weren't terribly enthusiastic about perusing the images I spent so much time to put up in the first place.

The main area that was lacking however, was also lacking in all of the photo album systems I checked out. None of them seemed to have a comprehensive indexing and searching scheme. I was planning to have a lot of pictures posted (there are currently well over a thousand up on my site).

So, it was back to the drawing board for a PHP web-based system. In the summer of 2002, I got the idea for what has sprouted into the current-day Photozen. To implement a good indexing and searching system, a database backend is needed. I chose MySQL, as I already has some experience with it.

The system, originally called MyPhotoAlbum, then later Digital Photo Album quickly blossomed into a huge project with thousands of lines of code. It has been under vaguely constant progress since its inception with occasional bursts of activity. I am the sole developer at this time.

Photozen has always been meant to be an open source project. Currently, I am waiting until I have time to switch the site engine over to the PHP5 object oriented model. I also need to do a large amount of bug fixing and code cleanup. When those things are accomplished, I will put up a project page, probably register the project with freshmeat.net, and make the source code available to anyone who wants it. If you have any specific questions about Photozen, or would like to try it out, please send me an email.