After releasing Gallery 2.3 back in October, the folks behind the “your photos on your website” software have decided to free the 2.x version and begin work on Gallery 3 which will include an rewrite of the software.
Those of you that have been paying attention know that something is going on! At the Gallery Sprint a few weeks ago, we made a lot of decisions and got the ball rolling on a complete rewrite which we’ve decided to call Gallery 3. Development of new features on Gallery 2 has been frozen, Gallery 1 is now a completely separate project “Jallery“, and the Gallery team is now busy at work on Gallery 3. It’s definitely not ready to run on your website yet but we’ve set the ambitious goal of having a 3.0 release by February 1, 2009 and are on track to meet that goal. Read on for details of why we’re doing this and what you can expect.
In the comments to the announcement, one of the developers emphasizes increasing the performance of Gallery as one of the goals of the rewrite. As awesome as Gallery is, I’ve noticed that now that I’ve got more than 22,000 photos online using it that it has seriously slowed down in a number of areas, especially in adding new photos.
If they can achieve significant performance increases, the rewrite will more than justify the inconvenience it will create among people who have modified the code or written plugins for 2.x that will almost certainly have to be rewritten for 3.x.