Automatic Photo/Video Thumbnail Gallery?

[metacollin]

Hi, I have a smartphone (HTC Dream running Android, specifically) and I wanted to do something I thought would be relatively simple. I thought it would be neat to have a publicly accessible 'mirror' of all the photos and movies I take with my phone on a subdomain (phone.domain.com, for example).

On the phone side, I have it setup to automatically upload pictures and videos to a specific directory on my bluehost webspace via FTP. This works fine, but I don't want to force friends to stare at an ugly directory listing. I set out to find an appropriate script, but have run into nothing but trouble.

Every script I've tried either fails to automatically load files from a directory, supports only photos, or cannot display thumbnails from videos.

gallery2 doesn't automatically load files from a directory, and zenphoto can't make thumbnails from the video. Gallery2 could, but it requires ffmpeg which isn't supported on bluehost (too much CPU, though I think generating thumbnails once should be fine).

A gallery style script OR a blog-style posting script would be nice, it doesn't matter to me.

I want:
1. Automatically add files when they are uploaded to a directory
2. Thumbnails for the pictures and videos (.3gp format)

OR

1. A 3rd party service that will convert videos to FLV (like youtube) and will automatically post them to some sort of XML-RPC enabled script, or something similar - the videos can either be uploaded to my webspace or remain remotely hosted. I can take care of automatic XML-RPC image posting myself.

Any ideas? This seems like a really simple problem, but solutions have proven difficult.

[Eriksrocks]

I want:
1. Automatically add files when they are uploaded to a directory
2. Thumbnails for the pictures and videos (.3gp format)

The only way I can see how #1 would work would either be a constantly running process (which would be an impossibility on Bluehost) or a cron job that updated the gallery. A cron job would be possible, but the gallery wouldn't be updated in real time, just as often as the cron job runs. Do you know how zenphoto does it?

Thumbnails for the videos are going to be problematic. I've searched the web and the only solutions I've come up with involve ffmpeg. Althought Bluehost says it is "not supported" that might not mean that it is outright banned. You may still be able to get it installed if you know what to do, but don't expect Bluehost to help you. If it is banned or they prevent it in some way, you could try contacting Bluehost and explaining what you're doing and that ffmpeg will only be used briefly to generate thumbnails. Most users who want to run ffmpeg want to run a YouTube clone-type video sharing site, which is obviously way beyond the scope of a shared hosting account. Ask them if they'll allow it on your account, and you might get lucky. They are sometimes pretty accommodating on those types of things. (Edit: or maybe not - here is a good thread on ffmpeg and Bluehost)

Assuming you can use ffmpeg, you could then probably setup a custom cron job on Gallery 2's updating script that would update the gallery listing as often as you wanted. (If that's not possible with Gallery 2, you could try the Gallery 3 beta which may support that option.)

Other than that, I really don't have any other ideas.