Mediawall.

1What it is, and who it is for

Mediawall puts a folder of photographs and videos on the web as a continuous display: a grid with sorting and adjustable thumbnail size, a full-screen viewer, and a canvas slideshow with named transitions and filter effects. Each folder can be a public wall or a password-protected one. On labs.llc, the public view at ?public=1 shows the site's NYC photo and video collection, and a companion page shows the same archive as a lazy-loading wall with search and a shuffled slideshow.

It is for anyone who wants a folder of pictures on the web without a hosted photo service, and, on labs.llc, for visitors browsing the NYC collection.

2How it works

Server-side PHP with browser code on top. mediawall.php, 412,510 bytes, is both the console and the public view (679–685). Settings and bcrypt password digests live in data/mediawall-config.php, moved there, the comments record, after sharing the name config.php wiped the site's own settings (4–8, 24–60). media-list.php lists media/ as JSON, folder by folder, under the console's own access rules, so a public root no longer announces the names of private sub-folders (media-list.php 1–40).

The wall engine, wall.js, reads only that list. Each tile draws a 480-pixel JPEG thumbnail, and media-thumb.php makes a missing one on demand rather than letting a tile load a multi-megabyte original; the comment works through why twelve 4 MB originals meant fifty megabytes to draw one screen (wall.js 1–27; media-thumb.php 1–12). Tiles lazy-load, the viewer preloads the next image, and the slideshow draws from a shuffled bag so nothing repeats until everything has shown; per-frame randomness, the code notes, repeats a picture about once every four slides (wall.js 28–36). The public page also loads Tailwind from cdn.tailwindcss.com and html2canvas from cdnjs (mediawall.php 2371–2374).

3The test

We loaded the public view, the list it reads, the companion wall and the thumbnail maker from the local 537 copy. We did not contact the live site.

1. 20:20:34 UTC

   Loaded the public view, ?public=1.

   HTTP 200, 278,571 bytes of HTML in 0.004 s; title 'MEDIA WALL'; robots 'noindex, follow'; scripts from cdn.tailwindcss.com and cdnjs (html2canvas 1.4.1). Visible text: '0 FILES' and 'NO MEDIA YET', beside SIGN IN, SLIDESHOW, REGEN, REFRESH and LOCAL controls.

2. 20:20:57 UTC

   Called media-list.php.

   HTTP 200, 83 bytes: ok, not public, no folders, no items. The build tree ships media/ with only an empty thumbnails folder; the photo archive is not part of the code.

3. 20:33:45 UTC

   Loaded the companion wall, and called media-thumb.php naming no file.

   Wall HTTP 200, 56,585 bytes; thumbnail maker HTTP 400, 12 bytes.

4Against the field

Each rival was read on its own pages on the test day. Pencil marks what it does better; red, where Mediawall goes further.

5Where it falls short

• We could not see the collection. The archive is not in the code tree, the local copy shows '0 FILES', and we did not fetch the live site.
• Heavy, and leaning on third parties. 278,571 bytes of HTML before a single picture, plus scripts from cdn.tailwindcss.com and cdnjs.
• Console clutter. The public view carries SIGN IN, REGEN, REFRESH and LOCAL controls on what is meant to be a display.
• A wall, not a library. No search by content, faces or places, no albums, no phone backup; it shows a folder and does not organise one.
• One very large file. 412 KB carries the console, the public view and the slideshow, and its own comments record past defects: a config collision that wiped the site's settings, a root listing that exposed private folder names.

6The verdict