Pixory will work properly only with browsers that support modern standards for css and javascript. It is known to work with IE 5.5+ on Windows, and Mozilla based browsers on all platforms. Pixory does not render properly on browsers that do not properly support (as far as I can tell) css. This includes IE 5.2- on OS X, Opera, and Apple's Safari. All users, composer and viewers, must set their browsers to accept cookies.

Note: If you are upgrading from a 1.x or 2.x version, Pixory will force you to reenter your configuration information, because the 3.x configuration scheme is not backwards compatible.

Linux & Windows stand-alone application

Acquire pixory.zip and unzip it. The pixory.jar file is an executable jar file. Double clicking it on a system that has a jre 1.4 installed should launch the application and a browser. The automatic browser launcher might not work on some platforms, like linux, depending on your configuration. If browser launching does not occur automatically, you can connect to the login page on the local machine at: http://127.0.0.1:8081/pixory/pxapplication?service=page/AlbumBrowser. You can reach the public Home page at http://127.0.0.1:8081/pixory/ or http://127.0.0.1:8081/pixory/pxapplication. If executable jars do not work on your platform, that is they don't automatically launch a java virtual machine, you can manually launch the application with this command: java -jar pixory.jar. If you want to run pixory on a headless (monitorless) server, its: java -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar pixory.jar.

Mac OS X

First, read the limitations.html file carefully. In particular, note that Pixory requires java 1.4.1+. The preferred way to run Pixory on OS X is with the native OS X application. Download pixory-osxapp.dmg, mount the disk-image, and copy pixory.app to wherever you keep your applications. Double clicking pixory.app will launch the Pixory application which should in turn automatically launch a browser window for you. If a browser window does not autolaunch, connect to pixory at: http://127.0.0.1:8081/pixory/pxapplication?service=page/AlbumBrowser. Note: Do not quit Pixory by using the "force quit" option in the context menu for the pixory dock icon-- you risk corrupting the Pixory database if you do this. Always stop pixory by using the "shutdown" feature inside the Pixory UI. Mac OS X users can also run the the stand-alone Pixory jar-based distribution. However, Pixory will not work properly if you simply double click the executable jar. Instead, always run the Pixory stand-alone distribution in a shell, and always run it in headless mode: java -Djava.awt.headless=true -jar pixory.jar.

Servlet Web Application

Acquire pixory-webapp.zip and unzip it. The pixory.war file is a standard web archive that contains everything needed to run Pixory. Hot or cold deploy it into the web application deployment directory for your app server. For JBoss that's: [JBOSS]/server/default/deploy. For Tomcat it's: [TOMCAT]/webapps. After war deployment, the main Pixory page can be accessed at: http://[host]:[port]/pixory/pxapplication?service=page/AlbumBrowser. You can reach the public Home page at http://[host]:[port]/pixory/ or http://[host]:[port]/pixory/pxapplication.

When you first start pixory it will force you to choose an 'image directory', before you can do anything else. The 'image directory' is the top level directory under which all your 'albums' (photographs and text) are stored. Beneath the image directory, any subdirectory that has no subdirectories of its own (excepting hidden subdirectories, or subdirectories that start with '.') is considered an 'album', whether or not it currently contains images. You can add images to an album directory at any time, directly through the native filesystem, and they will show up in the album. However, you can't add subdirectories to an album directory-- if you do, that directory is no longer considered an album and won't show up as such in the interface.

Read the documents in the ./docs directory, especially limitations.html.