file creation date

ertmann_CPH

I'm in the process of making a custom photo gallery....

for that i would like to be able to use the creation date of the images for organising my photos

however it is my understanding that 'filectime' is only the lastest modification date of the file
(http://dk.php.net/manual/en/function.filectime.php)

been plowing to google and the manual for a solution for this, however everything seems to be using 'filectime'

so my two questions are;

1) When is the metadata of a file changed? when moving from the camera to the hdd? When uploading from hdd to server? When editing the photo with the gimp? As i sometimes upload a few weeks later than when i took the photos it would be nice with a way to circumvent this
NOTE camera is using 'vfat' and hdd is using 'reiserfs' - the server im not really sure of, but it is also Linux based, so probably ext2/3

2) if so, is there a way around this? using a different function? or something else?

drew010

if you were to take a picture today, and upload it to the server one week from now, the filectime would give you the date of one week from now. if you were then to edit it 3 days later, the new filectime would show the time at which it was last edited. there is no way to tell when it was created on the server. if you are using a digital camera, and you have the date set on the camera properly, you may be able to use jhead to retrieve data from the file such as the time the picture was taken, what camera was used, and other pieces of information about the picture.

id10t

Also check out filemtime

drew010

the only difference between filemtime and filectime, is that ctime will change when the file inode changes, therefore if you chmod the files, or chown them the ctime changes, but the mtime only changes when the contents are modified. but still doesnt give the creation.

ertmann_CPH

ok thanks for input, but it raises some new questions im affraid...

how does php integrate with binaries? the way it see it the approach would be to

check if headerfile exists
if exists read date stamp and print
if it doesn't exist, call execution of exif with the -cs modifier, to have exif write a file with the header information
read the datestamp and print

right?

could anyone point me to some information about binary calls and php?

AstroTeg

I'm just thinking out loud here: Have you thought about: storing the file names in a database with the date added or rename the files with the date they were added (something like: 20050224_myfilename.jpg)

The database is kind of nice because you'll be able to query off of it pretty quickly and easily. If you don't want to muck with a database, then storing the date in the file name is kind of nice since you can use PHP's directory functions and you don't have to spend CPU cycles trying to read the header contents of each image.

ertmann_CPH

yeah i did....

Well, guess i better explain myself...

the reason im doing this is because im a lazy (or convinient depending on who you ask) person... on top of that im quite fond of the SimpleViewer navigation, which is .xml based....

this is a most unfortunant combination, which oftens means I upload photos when they're not all that interresting anymore (im quite a paparazi sometimes and showing two friends kissing isn't that interresting weeks after 🙂)

so basicly im trying to devise a procedure that would just leave me responsible of uploading the folder, and then let php take care of generating the xml and updating the list of available galleries (sorted by week number), something like this ( 1st part basicly just a directory listing with links | 2nd part is the tricky one):

Party at Uni | week 49
Party at Jakobs | week 48
Trip to Madrid | week 47

Problem is if i upload the Uni and Jakob pictures at the same time, they would both be listed as something like week 50, which im not too fond of, if i then edit a photo in one of those folders a week after, the date would be even more missleading)

Guess I could solve some problems, by naming the folders with the appropriate name and week, but how would i have the list sorted by date then? what about pictures from the same week in two different years? how would i go about converting the foldername "Party_at_Jakobs_week48_2004" to "Party at Jakobs | Week 49, 2004"?

I was thinking about making it database driven, but that leaves even more problems to solve...

AstroTeg

Ok, I'd say go with doing the directory structure. You might want to test it with your setup, but you can access the folder's creation date (which I don't think will change unless you rename the folder - but I could be wrong - this is why you'll want to test it). Then sort the list of folders based on the date.

You can actually have spaces in your folder names. The trick is some special characters like / don't do so well. Again, some experimenting will determine if this will be a fit for you.

To move forward, figure out how to read a directory. Then figure out how to get the directory's date. Then shove all the directories (and the dates) in an array and sort.