If you have a digital camera, you've probably accumulated more photos than you know what to do with. Hosting your pictures on your own site may be the way to go. Using a PHP based shareware solution, the online image database is free of charge, and you can also run it on a Linux server, which eliminates the need to purchase a server license from Microsoft.

There are numerous Java or PHP-based applications for photo sharing, and most include some form of bulletin board or forum. Not needing this functionality, we chose to take a close look at Exhibit Engine 1.5 RC4 ( http://photography-on-the.net/ee/beta ). Developed by Pekka Saarinen, Exhibit Engine (EE) is a full-featured Web photo-gallery application that focuses on maintaining thousands of photos for avid photographers.

EE's support for EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) and IPTC (a standard developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council) allows for the display of detailed technical information and descriptive metadata with each photograph. Users can also link and display information about their gear (cameras, lenses, and so forth) to each photo. All of the information is stored in a database. EE is capable of rapidly sorting and searching the database and displaying the results on the fly in the form of thumbnails or micro-thumbnails. You can see an EE-powered gallery in action on the photography-on-the.net site.

Installing Exhibit Engine is fairly straightforward, provided you have a basic knowledge of Linux or Unix. You can also run EE on any platform that supports the Apache Web server, PHP, and a MySQL database.

Since Exhibit Engine has been in development for years, we decided to go with the development version of EE.

Before installing, make sure you have certain prerequisites in place. First, you need a working FTP server. If your Linux distro did not install a default FTP server, we recommend vsftpd ( http://vsftpd.beasts.org ). Also, make sure that you have administrative rights to a MySQL database server running on your system, since the EE installation script will create a new database and tables.

To start, you should create a directory under your Web server root called "GALLERY" and then follow the installation instructions. The installer will run as a PHP script off the Web server ( http://yourserver/GALLERY/install.php ).

Once the base installation is done, you have to configure the upload system that will let you add photos to the database. The URL http://yourserver/GALLERY/input/EDITOR_loginpage.php will let you access the collection of complex but well-designed configuration editors. From here you can manage all parts of your setup.

The first step is to set up your FTP server account and connection. Make sure you load the FTP module for PHP and check your file post-size settings in PHP. We recommend setting your post size to 24MB or more, depending on the size of the images you want to upload. (We sometimes ran into problems with lower settings, especially when uploading large images or when batch-processing many images.)

Once all your FTP tests pass, you can move on to setting up your graphics modules. EE uses tools and graphics libraries to create thumbnails, micro-thumbnails, and watermarks, and to manipulate your images. We recommend ImageMagick, since the results with it seem to be the best by far.

Before you run any of the included tests, make sure to disable your Web browser's cache. After a successful test, you can proceed to set up your resizing method of choice. The resize-method editor allows you to create custom-sized templates. Thumbnails and micro-thumbnails, for example, rely on these templates and will be created automatically when you upload images.

The final configuration step and menu that you'll spend some time with is the path-setup editor. This editor lets you define upload paths for the full-size and resized images. Here you can decide if you want a global thumbnail directory or individual thumbnail directories for all your individual image galleries. We recommend that you experiment with a handful of images and see what best suits your needs.

The upload to the database is easy. Copy the images you wish to upload to http://yourserver/GALLERY/input/UPLOAD , create a new exhibition in the EE Web interface, and proceed to the upload to database menu. You'll see that all your selected images appear in the upload folder. All you need to do now is to select your size paths and target exhibition, and press the upload button. If everything is working correctly, you should end up with your first image gallery under http://yourserver/GALLERY/index.php . You can now either share your gallery URL with friends or send them links to select galleries or images.

Oliver Kaven is a lead analyst at PC Magazine.