MacDevCenter has published an excellent automated digital photo gallery creation howto written by Mike Schienle of Custom Visuals, LLC. This is Mike's first article for the O'Reilly Network, but in my opinion, it's similar in quality to Phillip Torreone's How-To Friday articles that have been published recently on Engadget.

Mike's article walks us through the design and implementation of a digital photo gallery that leverages Sendmail or a similar MTA, MySQL, and Perl with the ImageMagick image manipulation modules. The design hinges on using an email account as an intake mechanism for the automated gallery builder. It's a brilliant design because it's:

1. simple,
2. based on a well-defined personal need,
3. well documented,
4. easy-to-implement, and
5. extensible.

Although the article talks about using the digital photo gallery builder with Apple iPhoto, it could be used successfully with almost any personal digital photo management application as its front end. Mike implements his gallery builder on a Mac OS X server, but it's written in a way that would allow it to run on Linux or any other UNIX derivative without alteration.

I've got a ton of digital photos that my wife and I would like to be able to show to friends and family. So, building a digital photo gallery makes a lot of sense. I've also got experience with all of the individual components that are used in this design. You can bet that I'll have a version of this implemented on one of my servers soon.