I am just now starting to plan an online gallery. I'm in the research phase right now, where I would like to gather whatever I might need to get it done. I'll describe what I am thinking and perhaps someone has pointers or constructive criticism on how I can organize myself.
This will be a multi user gallery. A user will simply be able to create an account and add or delete images to their gallery. I would like to avoid javascript if possible. The reason for that is that I do not need anything fancy in ways of display. In other words, I want my pages to be simple, flat and lean. Mostly html5 and php. The gallery will specialize in gif and png images. The reason for this is the style of art I would like to represent. It looks best when images are not compressed unless it's lossless compression. In other words, there is no need for fancy graphics libraries.
I would like to keep images in the users own folders. I don't want to encode images into a database, so I am not sure how a database would relate to the filesystem. Except for user authentication.
I'm a programmer but not a web developer. It's not necessary to go over how to program, so I am asking mainly questions about how to organize the code. Perhaps how to organize them into modules. For example, I know I will be using MySQL, so how many databases do I need. Should I keep user tables together with whatever else I need and etc. As I said, I just got a glimpse of web development.
I'm also looking for example code. Please don't throw a CMS at me. I said I was a programmer, but the last thing I want to do is take apart an already working system. The time to decipher something complete would be unnecessarily painful. I am looking for module like examples. I have seen hotscripts.com, which is a very nice website, but I'm not sure what I need from there.
There are many galleries on the web, but has anyone here ever done something like this? what recommendations do you have, what input do you have? Thank you in advance!