Advice on creating albums within a photo gallery

[php_beginner_83]

Hi All

I'm currently trying to develop a database driven photo gallery. So far I have it working and displaying images no problem. The next step I want to take is to create seperate photo albums, e.g an album with my Christmas photos, another for holiday photos etc.

The idea I had was in the table in my database to include 2 additional fields, one to record the name of the album the photo belongs to and another to indicate whether that picture is the cover photo of the album. Then I could use a MySQL query to get all the photos that belong to the albums and get the cover picture. On my webpage, I would like to display the cover picture with the name of the album beneath it and when the user clicks the name of the album, a page will open displaying the contents of the selected album.
I would like your opinion of my way of thinking. Do you think it is a good way to do this or do you have a more simple idea. I would really appreciate any advice you have to give.

Thank you.

[NogDog]

I would probably have at least 3 tables, including the table with the images.

• images - probably the table you already have for all images in the gallery

• albums - info that describes each album

• image_to_album - could just be 2 columns: image_id and album_id (the primary keys from the other 2 tables)

For the "cover photo", I'm undecided right now whether I would make that a 3rd column in the image_to_album table or a column in the albums table, though I think I'd go with the albums table as that automatically limits you to one cover photo per album.