Search engine for a photo site

[soboyle]

I'm just starting to do some homework for building a search feature for my photo website, my goal is to allow potential customer to search all my photographs (many thousand) using keywords, or preselected catagories, and then have pages of resulting images display. I'm new to programming (other than html) but would like to give this a go. First, are PHP and MySQL the right tools for the job? If so can you point me to a good source for tutorials that run through a search engine construction. I realize its going to be a long haul to get this up and running with many bumps in the road, but I don't see a workable alternative to getting a search engine for my site.

[ergophobe]

soboyle,

Yes, you could do this with PHP and MySQL. The first thing to ask is whether you've looked at any photo gallery scripts that are already out there. Perhaps gallery or coppermine or one of the other major PHP gallery scripts has this ability already (I don't know, but I'd start there).

Otherwise, what you would probably want to do is create a database table that has fields like
-filename
-title
-description

for your photos and then use a full text index [dev.mysql.com]. I think this is probably running way ahead of you though. To backtrack, check out the thread Jatar_K started on Learning PHP [webmasterworld.com]. That will get you going, but I think you may find this fairly complicated, so first spend some time on google seeing if something already exists that you can just use off the shelf.

Tom

[soboyle]

Tom
Many thanks, I will look into the scripts you mentioned. If you know of any more photo scripts please let me know the names. It doesnt make sense to reinvent the wheel, especially when I know next to nothing about programming. Coppermine looks quite impressive.