How can I place a load of media materials online so that approved people can easily download the material?

November 20, 2007 9:10 AM

How can I place a load of media materials (JPGs, TIFFs, PDFs, Video etc) online so that approved people can easily download the material?

This needs to be easily browsable (e.g. categories, preferably tags, thumbnails of everything etc), and password protected (in an ideal world with several category of users).

Also, if you wanted to download a dozen images, the ability to add them to a "basket" to download as a zip file would be excellent.

It also needs to be pretty simple for people to upload new material as well.

(Basically; I was thinking of writing my own in PHP using S3 as storage medium etc but there MUST be a simpler way to do it)

posted by Hartster to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

I was thinking of writing my own in PHP using S3 as storage medium etc but there MUST be a simpler way to do it

Not necessarily! Especially where the batched media retrieval is concerned, which I've never seen before in the wild.
posted by rhizome at 9:39 AM on November 20, 2007

If you didn't want any bells and whistles, a simple password-protected ftp site could work (and viewed on the web). We do this all the time where I work.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 9:45 AM on November 20, 2007

I have used Xdrive in the past at my job. Many of our projects were printed overseas, so it was a very efficient and dependable way to share large files.

You can organize your folders into categories within Xdrive. I don't believe that you can automatically turn several files into a .zip file, though. You'd have to take care of that on your end and then upload the .zip file for others to download.
posted by Ostara at 9:53 AM on November 20, 2007

You could always open a gmail account and give your username and password to trusted people. It wouldn't have all the features you want, but it would take about 5 minutes to set up.
posted by faceonmars at 11:12 AM on November 20, 2007

Spartan, but: .htaccess files in web directories work really well. If you want to make something that will allow you to download a cart of images you might have to get your hands pretty dirty in the PHP. I would suggest perhaps looking into Gallery for a quck-n-easy fix.
posted by roygbv at 12:23 PM on November 20, 2007

Gallery2 will do exactly this, including adding watermarks to the thumbs if you want.

The Zipfile Cart downloads are built in to one of the core modules.

As far as managing permissions, you could do that per album.
posted by tomierna at 1:01 PM on November 20, 2007

I have used drop.io a few times. No registration required on anyone's end, you can limit access to the files with a password, and set when you want to delete the drop.
posted by aquitone at 3:32 PM on November 20, 2007

It sounds to me like you want a clone of PictureView.
It does everything you asked for - including the .zip folders for selected pics.
posted by Gerard Sorme at 4:15 PM on November 20, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the suggestions: I'll have a look into all of these. My main fear is that some of them may not handle non-image materials well, if at all, and that they'll choke on the size and format of some of the image files.

(I perhaps should have said; most of the stuff will be to provide materials for people to use in their print marketing, so could be 10MB PDFs of adverts, could be 20 meg tiffs, could be in CMYK not RGB etc)
posted by Hartster at 2:44 AM on November 21, 2007

ask andre torrez
posted by goldism at 4:36 AM on November 21, 2007

I solved a similar problem by creating a Wordpress blog (which allows you to easily upload images and files, as well as automatically creating thumbnails for them) with the HidePost plugin. It doesn't have the "basket" functionality, but it is usable, easy to set up, and looks professional.
posted by designmartini at 9:53 AM on November 21, 2007