It seems a shame that Gallery and Coppermine offer resize of filles and their concomitant sizes, but you can't upload them in the first place.
So you complain that for users on a dial up connection it takes too long to upload large files? What could
we (as Coppermine developers) possibly do to circumevent this? Buy them a faster connection?
However, then if a person is not on a high speed connection, he or she will run into browser timeouts.
You complain that browsers run into timeouts? What could
we do as a cure? Force browser manufacturers to review
their code?
This is simply impossible: we can't overcome client-sided or browser-sided limitations, as we're not internet service providers nor browser manufacturers.
To circumvent your issues with clients on slow connections and browser-timouts,
you have to provide your users a tool that does the needed resizing on the client (before they upload). Best option is to teach your users how to use batch-resizing methods with well-known desktop apps like IrfanView (there's a
tutorial available for this purpose as well). I consider it the best option because there's an additional benefit for your users if they understand how things work; the ability to resize pictures is helpful not only when trying to upload them to a web-driven gallery, but for other purposes (e.g. sending them by email) as well.
If it were me I'd simple do a batch reszie in Photoshop and FTP them
Teaching your users to use Photoshop would be overkill: not everybody who was a digital camera has got access to Photoshop - it's the state-of-the-art tool that is quite expensive and offers way too many options for newbies. FTPing is not an option at all for non-admin users for security reasons. As suggested above: there are easier (and cheaper) solutions available.
However, I understand that you can't take the time to explain this to end users, as their skill level differs, as well as their tolerance level. So the second best option comes into play: provide them with a tool to resize and upload pics in one go. The
XP_Publisher that comes with Coppermine in conjunction with users on Windows XP is one possible choice, third party apps like
JUpload (Java-driven) another option. Even for Linux users there is a great tool named "
Koppermine". Menalto Gallery comes with "
Gallery Remote", which is a great tool that does similar things.
With Gallery, I could get the uploads to whatever size I wanted by creating a php.ini file in the main Glallery directory, and adding lines for memory usage, and etc., like this:
php.ini
post_max_size = 12M
upload_max_filesize = 12M
After all, you have figured out that you can overcome server-sided restrictions (that are imposed by the
webhost, not Coppermine nor Menalto Gallery) by adapting the settings in php.ini.
Please read the sticky thread "
Trouble-shooting the upload process." on this board to find out more about server-sided restrictions.