Right, finally I’ve managed to get the ability to upload images into Coppermine working again.
The problem I was having seemed to occur on upgrading to the 1.4.x stream of Coppermine, and results in errors like this…
Unable to create thumbnail or reduced size image.
File: /var/www/xxxxx/gallery/db_input.php - Line: 391
It seems there’s some issue with ImageMagick and the stock solution offered on Coppermine’s forums is to switch to GD2 instead, but it turns out that’s not configured on Fedora Core to work with PHP. I recently found a post saying how to install it, and it boils down to issuing a command like this…
# yum install php-gd
This will install the GD extensions to PHP. Then just restart your web server…
# /sbin/service httpd restart
and configure Coppermine to use GD instead of ImageMagick (it’s under Config -> Files and thumbnails advanced settings -> Method for resizing images).
Finally! It now works. It’s not a decent solution as ImageMagick still doesn’t work, but at least uploads work.
No thanks to the Coppermine forum guys though. Aside from the original bitchyness about not posting in the right way when asking questions, their help was aimed at the “user is an idiot and we don’t care” level and not once did it even touch on the solution here.
I would post the solution over there but frankly their attitude stinks so much that I just don’t feel like helping them out. They give anyone new, confused, foreign, whoever, a hell of a lot of grief with no sympathy and then they wonder why people get annoyed with them and don’t thank them for their “efforts”. Frankly I feel no compulsion to contribute to their efforts, but I’m happy to publish my help outside of their forum.
Now with that in mind, I cannot really recommend Coppermine any more. Their attitude in supporting it is one thing, but it also is getting targeted a lot more by hackers these days, and the likes of Gallery and Exhibit Engine (version 2 of the latter is looking very nice but not released yet) are better in features, design and usability (and their “customer support” is much better too).