Gallery 2.3 is finally out of beta and available for downloading. I’m approaching 25,000 photos in my online gallery and its performance is still excellent. The nice thing about 2.3 is it is setting the stage for some performance improvements in future versions, so hopefully by the time I’m up to 50,000 photos . . .
Tag: Gallery
How Do I Love Gallery? Let Me Count the 15,000 Ways
A few weeks ago I mentioned I had installed and was running Gallery 2 on my web server and using the WPG2 plugin to integrate it with WordPress. My publicly viewable photos are here, though right now it’s just a bunch of pictures I took of anti-war protests as well as shots of my wife’s pottery creations.
One of the thing I wondered was how well Gallery 2 would handle a lot of photos. Well, the other day I finally finished uploading the last of the 15,000 pictures I’ve taken with my digital camera over the past several years, and Gallery handled it without breaking a sweat.
Most of those pictures are not publicly viewable. They’re in a series of albums that are password protected and only viewable by admins. Gallery makes it easy, however, to copy items from one album to another, so it is relatively straightforward to select a bunch of photos in my private album and publish them to a public album.
Using a few plugins, Gallery seamlessly imports EXIF, etc. data from images. There’s also a very nice keyword function that lets you tag photos and automatically create virtual albums from those keywords. For example, I’ve tagged many of the photos of my kids with their respective names, so I can click on that keyword and see all photos of my daughter in a virtual album.
Gallery 2 and WPG
Gallery is a free, open source photo sharing web application which is a bit like saying a Ferrari Enzo is just another car. Gallery 2 pretty much lets the user set up a photo gallery from as simple as a couple pages of photos to as complex as dozen of albums and sub-albums, with dynamic keyword-based albums and other features thrown in for fun. It has options for password protected albums, RSS feeds, a commenting system, etc. There’s no feature I can think of that I really wanted that wasn’t already part of the core system or easily added on through a plugin.
Like WordPress, Gallery benefits from an active community of plugin developers who have extended the features of the software. One of the nicer features for WordPress users is the WPG2 plugin which integrates Gallery with WordPress so, for example, my Gallery pages use the same theme as my WordPress blog and appear to be simply pages under WordPress. Additionally, individual images can be easily inserted into WordPress pages or posts using a special WPG tag.
If you’ve got your own server, Gallery is a cheap and highly flexible way to host a medium to large photo site.