================
 What is Ansel?
================

:Contact: ansel@lists.horde.org

.. contents:: Contents
.. section-numbering::

Ansel is the Horde photo management application. It makes use of the Horde
frame work and integrates with other Horde applications.

Ansel is a full featured photo management application. With it, you can create
any number of galleries and subgalleries, share galleries among other Horde
users or even make them public. You can upload images either one at a time, as
a zip archive, or even upload them via Windows XP's "Publish to Web"
functionality. Once in Ansel, you can browse your images, download originals,
view galleries as a slideshow, add comments to images, send an 'ecard' to a
friend, and more. You can crop, resize and perform other image maniputlation
functions.  You can even have Ansel try to recognize people in your photos with
it's support for face detection. Ansel will read and store EXIF data associated
with uploaded images and can even auto rotate your images to the proper
position if the image contains the proper EXIF properties.

Ansel supports photo and gallery tagging - allowing you to browse your photos
by tags just like you were browsing a directory. You can also choose to have
certain EXIF tags automatically added to an image on upload.

Mulitple gallery themes are available. You can create thumbnails that have
rounded corners with shadows, sharp corners with shadows, or even make your
thumbnails look like Polaroids! Image viewing can use a lightbox-type overlay
on the gallery page, or can be a seperate image view page that can display
image attributes, comments and other types of information.

There are multiple ways to organize your photos within galleries. You can
create subgalleries to further organize photos and you can also have Ansel
automatically display a gallery's photos to you grouped by date.

Ansel supports mulitiple ways to access your photos from outside of
Ansel. There are mutlitple types of RSS feeds available, including most
recently added images for a particular user, gallery or tag. The ability to
embed widgets of your photos into external websites, such as blogs, is also
available.

For developers, Ansel also offers an external API that may be accessed via
Horde's RPC server or directly through the Horde Registry.  There are API
methods that make it extremely easy to embed gallery views on your own website.

This software is OSI Certified Open Source Software. OSI Certified is a
certification mark of the `Open Source Initiative`_.

.. _`Open Source Initiative`: http://www.opensource.org/


Obtaining Ansel
===============

Further information on Ansel and the latest version can be obtained at

  http://www.horde.org/apps/ansel


Documentation
=============

The following documentation is available in the Ansel distribution:

:README_:            This file
:COPYING_:           Copyright and license information
:`docs/CHANGES`_:    Changes by release
:`docs/CREDITS`_:    Project developers
:`docs/INSTALL`_:    Installation instructions and notes
:`docs/TODO`_:       Development TODO list


Installation
============

Instructions for installing Ansel can be found in the file INSTALL_ in the
``docs/`` directory of the Ansel distribution.


Assistance
==========

If you encounter problems with Ansel, help is available!

The Horde Frequently Asked Questions List (FAQ), available on the Web at

  http://wiki.horde.org/FAQ

Horde LLC runs a number of mailing lists, for individual applications
and for issues relating to the project as a whole. Information, archives, and
subscription information can be found at

  http://www.horde.org/community/mail

Lastly, Horde developers, contributors and users also make occasional
appearances on IRC, on the channel #horde on the Freenode Network
(irc.freenode.net).


Licensing
=========

For licensing and copyright information, please see the file COPYING_ in the
Ansel distribution.

Thanks,

The Ansel team


.. _README: README
.. _COPYING: http://www.horde.org/licenses/gpl
.. _docs/CHANGES: CHANGES
.. _docs/CREDITS: CREDITS
.. _INSTALL:
.. _docs/INSTALL: INSTALL
.. _docs/TODO: TODO
