Brian Arnopp

Brian,

> I want to create a searchable photogallery using a search form so that I
> can put in say, London, and all the thumbnails of London come up.

That is very ambitious for someone new to web development. There is a proper
way to do this, and an easy way to do it. The proper way is going to require
a lot of learning, but if you want to have a custom written one, I suggest
that is what you do.

1. use a MySQL database to store the information about the images - their
titles, their addresses on the server, their descriptions, keywords, etc.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/

2. Use PHP to read the query, use it to search the database, and output the
list of thumbnails.
http://www.php.net/manual/en/

3. Use a standard web form to pass the query to the PHP script:
<form method="get" action="imagesearch.php">
<p><input type="text" name="searchfor">
<input type="submit" value="Search!"></p>
</form>

If you want to learn all that, then that is a good thing, but it will be
slow, and you must take the time to learn about cross site scripting and
other potential vulnerabilities.

If you just want to do it the easy way, then find someone else's gallery
system they have made available. There must be quite a few open source
gallery systems lying around on the web (although since I chose to do
everything myself, I have never gone looking for one).


Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/