PHP comes bundled with GD (GIF Draw/Graphics Draw), which is a library for the dynamic creation of images. It can be used for simpler image operation, such as resizing, cropping, adding watermarks, creating thumbnails (Jeffrey wrote about it), applying basic photo filters - you've probably used it before. Unfortunately, if you want to create something more complex with GD, like Instagram effects, you can't. Luckily, though, we have ImageMagick!

He starts off by comparing the two graphics libraries and talks briefly about how to downliad and install Imagemagick on your development platform. Included is a PHP class to help you use it, coming complete with functions for changing the color tone of the image, adding a border and adding a vignette to the image. Also included are some "presets" represented in a few simple functions:

• Gotham
• Toaster
• Nashville
• Lomo
• Kelvin

There's also a few links to other resources you can use to find out more details on what Imagemagick has to offer.

This is the second article in a two part series in which I show you how to create a photo blog that is updated from your mobile device. Part 1 laid out the plan for building the application, set up the database requirements, and introduced you to some user contributed functions from the PHP manual which make it easy to retrieve messages from a POP3 mail server. In this installment I show you how to bring everything together so you can start photo-blogging on the go.

In this new tutorial they include the code to authenticate against the database, insert the email details into the tables and inserting the formatted results into blog posts. It's finished off with the code to pull out the latest entries and display them along with their matching photos.

This is the first article in a two-part series in which I will show you how to create a photo blog as part of your personal website which you can update from your phone simply by sending an email. You'll write a script to check the inbox of an email account for new messages using POP3; the script will extract the messages' subject line, body text, and attachments and update a database accordingly. You can then pull the information from the database for display on your blog, in a sidebar, or however else you see fit.

The start with some of the security considerations you'll need to keep in mind when creating a script like this depending on how open you want it to be (like filtering based on the "From" email or sending an approval message before posting). Included in the post is the SQL to create their basic tables for posts, image details and the pending items. There's also a PHP class (POP3) that makes an IMAP connection to a remote server, authenticates as your account and fetches the latest messages along with their attachments. These are pulled with a quick script and displayed via a foreach.

Part two will get into more of the integration of the images and the approval technique prior to posting the images.

• John Mertic's Deployable applications slides
• Lorna Mitchell's Teach a Man to Fish
• Lorenzo Alberton's slides
• Stuart Herbert's posts on Jeremy Coates, the Saturday speakers, track 1, Friday social, the audience
• Jamie Hurst's wrapup

As others pop up, they'll be added to the list. Don't see yours here? let me know!

In this tutorial we are going to create another full page image gallery with a nice thumbnail area that scrolls automatically when moving the mouse. The idea is to allow the user to slightly zoom into the picture by clicking on it. The thumbnails bar slides down and the image resizes according to the screen size.

Based on this tutorial, they show you how to build on it and add a few new features like a changing cursor depending on its position in the current image. The show the folder structure you'll need, the HTML and PHP to make the backend work and the CSS and Javascript to round out the frontend. If you want to skip straight to the good stuff you can also just download all the code and get started.

The plan for this one is that, if you're doing a sudoku puzzle in the pub or on the train, and you get stuck, you just take a snapshot of the puzzle with your camera-phone, send the photo to a certain mobile number, and a few seconds later the solution is sent back as an SMS message. The solution costs you something small - 50 cents, maybe.

The script looks at a picture of a sudoku puzzle, converts it to b&w and tries to find the squares surrounding each position of the board. With these measurements, the next step is to grab the numbers already in the puzzle and hand those off to the puzzle solver to be processed.

For those of you who have been following the last few screencasts, you must have noticed that each tutorial has been centered around a "photo site" theme. (See Scanning Folders With PHP, How to Dynamically Create Thumbnails, and Create a Photo-Admin Site Using PHP and jQuery. Today, we'll build the backend for a photo site. This tutorial will teach you how to add, delete, and update photos.

You can watch the screencast right in the post as well as follow along with the tutorial steps and download the source for their example.

Let's imagine that you want to build a page that will display snapshots of your latest work. [...] In such instances, the best solution is to make PHP scan your "portfolio" folder and dynamically create the code for you. If you want to update your page with a new snapshot, all that you need to do is drag the image, and its respective thumbnail, into the appropriate folders - and PHP will do the rest. Let's build it now!

The screencast comes complete with the entire source and a link to a demo to show the end result.

It's just that every time I sit down to have a go at [finding something in my photo or mp3 library], the sheer volume of data overwhelms me and I take the command decision to deal with something easier instead. Sounds familiar? If it does, help is at hand, in the form of PHP's ID3 and EXIF extensions. These extensions can help you organize and catalog your digital media collection so that it's easier to navigate and search. Keep reading, and I'll show you how.

He installs the ID3 package first (via the pecl command line tool) and gives a few sample scripts to pull the metadata information out of a mp3 file as well as update/remove the information that's already there. He even sets up a simple SQLite database to store the information he's retrieved.

The second part of the tutorial looks at grabbing the image metadata via the EXIF extension. This can yield all sorts of information including date/time the photo was taken, the resolution, the model of the camera and various camera settings at the time. He includes a sample script that automatically makes thumbnails for the images via the exif_thumbnail function.

I'm pleased to present you with part one of a two part series on creating a photo site using PHP, jQuery, and AJAX. Originally, I intended to fit the entire tutorial into one screencast, but that quickly became a pipe dream as I realized that there was simply too much to cover. Nevertheless, even if you only watch this first video, you should learn a great deal.

In this first part of the series he'll walk you through creating a simple login form to authenticate the user, grab images from the database and show how to keep the database updated. There's a screencast along with the code/html for the tutorial as well as a source download if you just want to skip straight to the good stuff.