On my picture website at http://pics.omnux.com I use the Gallery software that is probably the most widely used open source image gallery software around.

A few months ago, Gallery 2.0 was released. This was a pretty huge change from the Gallery 1 series of releases, and I was definitely excited about it. It seems to be almost a complete rewrite. It is now database driven (as opposed to flat files), supports modules instead having to code everything into the base code and should generally be the desired path going forward.

To this end, I have tested several different versions of Gallery 2.x. While it was still in beta I tried it; once 2.0 came out I tried it, and, I’ve tried the most recent release candidate of 2.1.

To make a long story shorter, I’m staying with Gallery 1.x for now. Here’s why, in no particular order:

  • The bulk watermarking feature isn’t yet in. Gallery 2.x has support for dynamic watermarking. You give it the watermark image and it dynamically applies it to source image before display to the user. However, it only automatically applies this watermark to new images that are uploaded. The only way to apply the watermark to existing images is to go in and do it one image at a time. This is a bit of a pain. This feature is listed as being #1 priority for the G2 folks, though, so I’m not too worried about it.
  • Performance. G2 is slower than G1. It’s as simple as that. Supposedly, once you get several thousand photos, the database backend should provide faster results. I’ve got a couple thousand at the current time. G2 just needs more CPU to give the same performance.
  • Keyword insertion into web pages. With G1, I have several keywords that describe the picture. G2 supports these keywords as well. G2 uses them for searching, as does G1. However, G1 also inserts the keywords into a META tag at the top of the individual image pages. G2 doesn’t do this. This hurts search engine optimization. I’m sure that this is something that I could tweak myself to get it working as it should.
  • I use Adobe bridge to work with my photos. I extensively insert titles, descriptions, and keywords from bridge. Adobe raw outputs the images as JPEGs, and I upload them using Gallery remote. However, the titles and descriptions (maybe the keywords as well.. don’t know) are being lost in translation. When the website gets them the meta data has disappeared. I could hack in the exif data work, but this should just automatically happen.
  • I use my phone to upload photos. This uses the galleryadd.pl perl script, and the script doesn’t currently put the photos in the right gallery. I expect this is because the folder name changed when going from G1 to G2, and I just need to figure out the proper syntax of the folders in the new G2. This is a pretty minor thing.
  • Finding where to change a setting is a headache in G2. In the G2 site config, I’m experience a definite learning curve. I remember seeing a setting somewhere but can’t remember where it was. I also assume this would fix itself over time.

So, none of this stuff is deadly. It just all adds up to more trouble than I want to deal with. I’ll let G2 mature a little bit more and investigate it again.

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