In May 2005 I started putting together my own PHP/MySQL-based photo sharing application so that I could showcase my photography to family and friends. In the subsequent months I have been adding on, making improvements as inspiration, necessity and available time warrant.
Many of the cool kids these days are using hosted services like flickr or Blogware (offered by Zygoat); those with their own sites might have installed Movable Type or Wordpress. Well, I didn't want to be at the mercy of a third-party admin or encumbered by limitations of existing tools, and furthermore I had some new ideas of my own I wanted to implement. So I started carving up my own basic cataloguing and viewing system.
I would love to share, so that you may run something similar on your site too. Things are not yet quite packaged up in a nice and portable ready-to-heat-and-serve manner, but I hope to post some such distribution soon. In the mean time please e-mail me and I'll help you set up.
— brk, March 2006