A few days ago I added a gallery to my website. I did some testing a while ago and I chose Original. Previously, I tested Gallery and it's Wordpress plugins, DAlbum and Singapore.

Gallery is very nice and has a lot of features. Problem with it was that it had way too many features for my needs and my willingness to configure.

DAlbum is also very nice and simple to use. But I didn't really like the general layout of it all - the tree on the left bothered me (maybe it reminded me too much of Windows Explorer...).

Singapore was another choice on the list. It came recommended by a friend. I liked it a lot, except for a few things. I didn't like the fact that thumbnails for galleries and individual image view are generated automatically the first time an image or gallery is view and that can be a little slow, sometimes. Another thing was that it didn't show any of the EXIF information stored in the image.

So, out of these 3 options, I chose the fourth :). Original was a combination of things I wanted from other galleries. Thumbnails, galleries and low quality images are generated by a script that uses convert from the imagemagick package. These are generated upon gallery creation and not when the gallery or image is viewed for the first time. I also liked the way the galleries were sorted and displayed (year, month and date) and that it's done automatically. Another plus was it's ability to display EXIF information.

So, I installed Original. Modified the code a little. Created a small gallery and started adding pictures. Then I started liking it less and less. Every time I added a new picture to a gallery, I had to rebuild it by hand. It's not complicated or time consuming. But the files are sorted alphabetically when galleries are created. That means that if I add a picture that messes with the order, everything gets rewritten (comments for existing images, hits for existing images). So, I removed Original and installed Singapore. I found it a more convenient way to manage photos and learned to live with the slow thumbnail generation. But it was missing one thing: EXIF information. So, by the power vested in me by the GPL (and inspired by the EXIF code in the Original gallery), Singapore can do that too. :)

Well, enough talk. Time to go take some more pictures.

Posted in: | photo | free_software | on 2008-01-18 12:26:00 by Andrei Moldovan