Website Gallery Software

[orionid]

I’ve been tasked/requested by my rocketry club to figure out a gallery software for our webpage. Requirements follow:

1) NO COPPERMINE (webmaster’s request… errr… demand, not sure why)
2) Must support multiple users uploading to the same gallery and public browsing.
3) Web upload preferred, but we’re all used to FTP at this point.
4) Ability to port in SQL database of users from SimpleMachines discussion forum would be nice, but not required.
5) should be Idiot/rocket scientist – proof.

I’ve been playing around with Gallery 2.3 and like it’s simplicity combined with the fact that it meets all the requirements….. Except for #5. During testing, it keeps crashing or timing out while uploading, and refuses to make thumnails or show the actual photos. I’ve played on both my server and the rocket club server, and the self checks on both say that the server has all the software requirements, but no dice.

ETA: Both servers are Apache running on Linux.

Does anyone have any experience with Gallery 2.3 that might-could lend a hand? Or does anyone have a recommendation for better gallery software? Was it SilverStag that developed a really nice scrolling flash gallery? What package did you use for that? Do you think it could meet our needs?

[olavf]

I’ve got two installs of gallery2 and haven’t really seen those issues, but I may have some time this weekend if you want to chat.

Also, have you looked at gallery3? It’s lighter and I’m not sure how extensible it is (what plugins are available)

As far as porting the userbase… that should be do-able, but I’m not an SQL guy. You may have to massage the tables so that they’re in the same format before you import, but I’ve restored/moved databases between machines without too much pain. You might also see if you BB has some extensibility where the two can talk together. There are plugins for Joomla that do this (one user base is the master and feeds the slave DB users)

(and I’m not a huge fan of Flash galleries, because it pretty much rules out anyone using an iProduct from seeing your stuff. Same with older versions of WebOS. There may be some gallery tools out there that do similar things in Java, but I haven’t looked.)

edit – you’re just looking for something like this when you’re done?
http://gallery.squareheadphotography.com/main.php

[SilverStag]

I used the YAPB (Yet Another Photo Blog) plugin for WordPress on my site, but there’s no Flash or anything involved. (Good grief, I need to update that!)

[orionid]

olavf, I may have to pick your brain a little more. I haven’t looked at gallery 3 yet. Gallery 2.3 was a plug-and go for my godaddy account, and I ported it over to the club server via ftp. Kat’s gallery is pretty much on, except we have no need for a shopping cart.

After a little more playing around, it looks like the issue I’m having is that it doesn’t like unedited photos straight from the camera. I also need to find a setting such that sub-galleries always float to the top, or just decide that no one gets a sub gallery. I’m not going to play around with aesthetics though, until I get the mechanics smooth.

If you want to play around a bit, the gallery test box is at http://www.buckscorner.com/gallery/. There are two test user accounts set up right now.

L: testuser1
P: cato

L: testuser2
P: cato

[olavf]

Look at the file sizes of the pics you’re uploading. The windows interface and the web interface have a 2MB limit IIRC. I don’t know about FTP – my servers are right here, so I often use the Windows uploader if I’m doing one or two, or the GalleryRemote java program (lets me title and add descriptions for a bunch of pics before upload, so when they’re up they’re live and all I have to do is add keywords and do any re-ordering)

For the sort order, you need to pick something other than the default order in the edit album tab (say, creation date) and then you get the option to presort albums first. I couldn’t see how the main gallery was set up, but the user1 gallery is set as default. You can change this in the root gallery and have it propagate to all the sub-albums.

As far as aesthetics go, there are a bunch of basic themes you can run with. Once you get an overall feel, they can be tweaked by editing the .css and whatnot. Just make sure you edit a copy in a subdirectory called ‘local’ so they don’t get overwritten when there are updates.

[olavf]

SilverStag that pops nicely. Can you organize it at all? It seems to be date-sequential?

[SilverStag]

There are a few drawbacks, one being that organization is difficult, and appears to default to the date. I’m looking into it as time permits.

[olavf]

I’ve found that most of the blog-type solutions don’t give you many options there, sadly :/

[soosh]

http://www.pixelpost.org/

is what I run at my totally-unused photo blog. It’s pretty slick.

why no coppermine? I’ve been using it for years.

[soosh]

also, there’s a ton of photo gallery packages over at sourceforge.net. hundreds of them.

[orionid]

So, I’ve been crash-coursing through php and learning all sorts of neatness. It kind of makes me think of it as perl for dummies. But anyway, I found an install for Gallery 3, got that set up, deleted the Gallery 2 install and started running. I finally found the problem in the php5.ini file, which had max post size and max upload size both set at 2M for global, and local overides turned off. Since then I’ve been systematically eliminating other errors (like setting the php/gallery max simultaneous uploads to one, because the server is set at two and if the third upload starts before the server finished processing the first, it crashes).

If you feel like taking a peek as I play around and set a few more things up, it’s now at http://www.buckscorner.com/gallery3/ (different l/p, but viewing permissions are set for anyone).

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