Well, after over a week (admittedly, I’m only poking it on the bus every few days, and only while driving into work), I managed to puzzle out enough from the source code of the Gallery Remote to figure out why my code wasn’t working.

If you’re executing a command, your message must be:
application/x-www-form-urlencoded

However, if you’re trying to upload data, your form must be:
multipart/form-data

Apparently, the system DIES if you try to consistently use one or the other. The former is simpler; the latter provides better performance for binary uploads. Mind you, this isn’t commented ANYWHERE.

I can understand the usage of the former when possible, and the latter when necessary. I can almost understand why no one bothered to mention it (After all, the W3 recommendation for form submission clearly indicates to use both as necessary). However, what I can’t understand is WHY my usage of the latter in all cases isn’t mapped the same way within PHP.

I mean, come on! Regardless of the way the data is submitted, the application platform should, for purposes of the dictionary-based lookup that PHP provides via the $form variable (I think that’s right, I don’t speak PHP), shouldn’t both submission mechanisms be abstracted away unless you want the added complexity?

I’m tired and have a cold, otherwise I would extend this rant into the direction of work. However, you may all count yourselves lucky. For I am going to sacrifice a kitten to my desire to snuggle something cuddly when I don’t feel well, and then I am going to bed. Nice deal, eh?

EDIT (16 Sept 08): Err. Maybe my bad. Turns out that while, by convention, a multipart/form boundary is specified as “———-” + RandomData, the actual usage as a boundary requires it to be prefixed with an additional two dashes. In other words, the actual, in use, boundary should be “————” + RandomData. Which, if you try to just look by eye, is far from visible. Unfortunately, if I had paid more attention to the documentation, the example they give isn’t prefixed by a series of dashes, and it’s far, far clearer. Still could have been explicitly documented (ABNF, anyone?). However, I’m not going to lambast the PHP team; they could have been working just fine all along.

If you want a good offline story, you’re pretty much stuck with DAM. There are a variety, and I randomly started with Expression Media — I got an excellent deal on it, so it made sense. I imported my pictures in version 1, and was frustrated when all the tags I had so painfully created in Windows Photo Gallery on XP, and then Vista, and then later Windows Live Photo Gallery, weren’t imported. SO I WROTE A SCRIPT. Expression Media, while not having the nicest developer experience, still provides a script-friendly API.
Set app = CreateObject("ExpressionMedia.Application")
Set tagx = CreateObject("XMPTagExtractor.TagExtractor")
For Each mediaItem In app.ActiveCatalog.Selection
tags = tagx.GetTags(mediaItem.Path)
mediaItem.Annotations.Keywords = Left(tags, Len(tags) - 1)
Next
Admittedly, I had to write a COM wrapper for the Vista-provided XMP library, but still. I was able to extract my information, and get it into Expression Media.

In the last week, while at work, I’ve gone through and added hierarchical keywords to almost all of my 25,000 files. The depth varies — in some pictures, I have every person tagged appropriately. In others, well, I identify where the picture was taken. Take what you can get. For the first time, however, I feel like I’m catching up with my four-year-old backlog. I still have to back everything up, but I have most of the pictures adequately keyworded such that I can find them again.

There are elements I really like about what I’ve figured out in Expression Media 2. I do appreciate that I filed a bug on my keywords not being imported, and it turned out that they didn’t handle one of Windows XP Photo Gallery’s tag mechanisms — and should be fixed in the next service pack. I can now round trip all my keywords in and out of the target files. I’ll be moving my pictures off my hard drive shortly, and look forward to using the fast sorting mechanisms to identify pictures I want to spend more time on.

However, there are a couple of items that I wish were just a bit more accessible — any photo editing needs to be done elsewhere. There are tools present, but it’s not worth my time to try to figure out how to use them, so I just load the pictures externally. The most painful place where this is necessary is in rotating photos. I still need to find a good workflow to correct pictures I didn’t take in a default landscape orientation.

Adobe Lightroom handles that portion of the task far better than Expression Media 2 does — all the editing tools are immediately available. Unfortunately, it’s slow as hell and a memory hog, but I’ll go into that on another occasion.