Welcome to Brendon Davis

Pictures on WHS

Autor brendon

My only biggest complaint with WHS was that there is no simple function for displaying photo galleries. Sure you can see your files remotely and if you store your photos in a logical file structure AND name them all individually you can easily find what you are looking for.  For all the rest of us, we are forced to log in, navigate to the share and randomly look through pictures until you find the one you want to show your friend. All through the BETA program I was on the lookout for plug-ins that would give me a simple photo gallery function that would render the photo’s strait from my directory structure.

So far I have found two add-ins that seem to work quite well. Both have a slightly different aim and features but both are very well written. For all the Goss,

WebGuide is an extension for both XP Media Centre and VISTA Media Centre to provide remote control and access to your content via a web browser. Doug Berrett has ported his code (in Beta currently) to be a WHS Add-in (installed using the console). The add-in runs an Apache web server and will share all content stored in the Pictures/ Videos and Music folders, thumbnails are generated for the pictures and music folders are displayed using the album art. The only downsides are the separate APACHE server requires a separate port to IIS and maintains its own user name and password list separate to the system.

Doug was recently hired by the Microsoft Media Centre team and is now providing his WebGuide for MCE free of charge. For anyone running a MCE box at home, who wants to provide access via a web browser (to PC’s and Mobile devices!!!) head on over and download a copy of the XP or VISTA versions.

The Windows Home Internet Information Services Toolkit, otherwise known as Whiist… (makes perfect sense) was coded by Andrew Grant and won the Code2Fame challenge for WHS Add-ins. It provides a lot of configuration options on how to publishh the site. It allows for both Public and Private (local basic authentication) access to your photo directories. Allowing for:

• Public gallery e.g.. http://my.homeserver.com/photos
• Private authenticated gallery e.g.. https://my.homeserver.com/gallery

Thumbnails are automatically created for all pictures and the folders use the standard folder structure. The software does not allow for the publishing of Music or Video libraries and cannot be used to upload photos. The only downside with the software is the inability to publish the root \\server\photos share, You must publis a folder at least one level below the root e.g.. \\server\photos\public. (You can publish the root, but it requires playing with permissions, files and IIS.)

So what am I using??

Well I run Whiist on my production server publishing the \\server\photos\ share as http://server/photos. The share requires authentication and I have placed a link to it after logging into the WHS web site. I also have modified the main picture to bring me back to the WHS main site.