Alternatives to the Gallery Photo-Publishing Web App
From: florin@andrei.myip.org (Florin Andrei)
To: svlug@lists.svlug.org
Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:03:45 -0700
Subject: [svlug] alternatives to Gallery ?
I'm currently using Gallery to put my pictures on the Internet:
It's very powerful software, but a chore to upgrade and troubleshoot. Not for lack of knowledge, I hope, but I just don't want to spend too much time fiddling with software on my site. I just want something that works and covers the basic stuff well. Moreover, an upcoming Gallery version will require PHP-5.2 to enable all features, while I will very likely stay with PHP-5.1.
So I'm looking for alternatives. Please suggest a similar software, ideally easier to maintain.
From: bill@macgod.net (Bill Teeple)
To: svlug@lists.svlug.org
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 22:00:04 -0700
Subject: [svlug] alternatives to Gallery ?
Gallery is nice and all, but I prefer to upload my own templates, so I use a quick script/app called JIGL - it is a perl based script which (in conjunction with Imagemagick and a few other apps - listed on the site) allow you to upload pictures to a folder and then apply a them to the folder - it is all static (however) and has to create the thumbnails and places them in separate directories.
Check it out here: http://xome.net/projects/jigl/
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 01:25:05 -0700
To: svlug@lists.svlug.org
From: Rick Moen (rick@linuxmafia.com)
Subject: Re: [svlug] alternatives to Gallery ?
Some people seem to like "tngal": http://www.foxbow.de/software/tngal/
"Album":
http://marginalhacks.com/Hacks/album/
http://www.linkstationwiki.net/index.php/Album_-_Photo_gallery_generator_which_has_theme_support
"llgal": http://home.gna.org/llgal
The latter's the leanest choice, I think.
From: Mark Weisler (mark@weisler-saratoga-ca.us)
To: svlug@lists.svlug.org
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2007 07:54:42 -0700
Subject: Re: [svlug] alternatives to Gallery ?
Digikam works well for me. http://www.digikam.org/
It's easy to tag and comment on photos for organizing them; also to export in various formats including HTML to make a web site or store on a CD or DVD.
Some features are...
- Organization of Photos in Albums and sub-Albums
- Comments can be added to Albums and individual photos
- Tags can be added to Albums and individual photos Albums
- Tags, Rating, Date and Time, Comments, Photographers ID, and Copyrights are stored in EXIF and/or IPTC metadata tags embedded in pictures. Comments are also stored in JPEG files to JFIF section.
Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 04:09:19 -0700
From: Drew Bertola (drew@drewb.com)
To: svlug@lists.svlug.org
Subject: Re: [svlug] alternatives to Gallery ?
Bill Teeple wrote:
> Gallery is nice and all, but I prefer to upload my own
templates, so I
> use a quick script/app called JIGL - it is a perl based script
which
> (in conjunction with Imagemagick and a few other apps - listed on
the site)
> allow you to upload pictures to a folder and then apply a them to
the
> folder - it is all static (however) and has to create the
thumbnails and
> places them in separate directories.
I wrote my own that does much of the same. What's nice about creating static content is that it can be burned to a CD, then sent off to mom or dad. All they have to do is open the index.html on the disc and start browsing your images.
On the server side, once the pages and thumbs are generated, it's much faster, naturally.
I was thinking of rewriting this though under Zend Framework. I'd just utilize the included caching capabilities with a very long ttl.
Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 14:00:21 -0700
From: Florin Andrei
Reply-To: svlug@lists.svlug.org
Subject: Re: [svlug] alternatives to Gallery ?
Thanks everyone for suggestions! If you have any other ideas, please post.
Drew Bertola wrote:
> I wrote my own that does much of the same. What's nice about
creating
> static content is that it can be burned to a CD, then sent off to
mom or
> dad. All they have to do is open the index.html on the disc and
start
> browsing your images.
That's a plus.
What I like about Gallery is that it's pretty much point and click. I need to setup a separate Gallery for my wife and, while she's smart, she's not a technical person. Scripts are OK, I guess, if they're really simple to use.
Second good point for G2 is that the project is huge, has a big community, it interoperates with Drupal and stuff like that (or they plan to?). It has lots of plugins, and for stuff like "generate a CD for mom" there's definitely a plugin somewhere that you can just install and use.
A pet peeve is that Gallery (and most other applications like that) do not seem to make sense from an interface design perspective. I want to dedicate a lot of screen real estate for the pictures, and keep everything else at a minimum. Navigation elements should just "make sense" (a la Apple) and be non-intrusive and stay the heck out of the way.
What do you mean "scroll down each time after clicking Next in order to see the entire image"? Are you crazy? I want to be able to just click Next-Next-Next and not move the mouse at all! So then the portion above the image should be as slim as possible, so as to not obscure the bottom part of the image.
And what's the deal with the tiny non-obvious navigation controls? If my 5 year old kid cannot figure it out in 10 seconds, it's basically worthless.
I hacked Gallery's Matrix theme a bit, in a bid to make it comply with at least some of the requirements above...
http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/main.php
...and it worked fine for a long time, but then G2 broke (no thumbnails anymore, but normal pictures are OK, Edit Album doesn't work anymore, no Apache errors, no SELinux messages - this is really screwed up) after upgrading the OS so I'm not sure how much you can figure out by just looking at it. Just imagine it still has thumbnails. :-/
I don't want to waste time fixing the damn thing. I'd rather just install something else, or reinstall G2 from scratch. But that means I need to rebuild all the albums. :-(
Hm, maybe I should just sign up with Flickr? :-)