Gallery2

I have photos scattered ALL over. My dream is to get these all in one place with the best of all presentations. The ultimate would be a lot like Google's Picasa Web Albums but with just a few more bells and whistles - things like the ability to store full resolution images.

My web host (Globat) gives me 100GB of web space so it seemed like the logical thing to do was to put the photos there. Now all I needed was some software to run there.

I searched high and low and found Gallery2 from Menalto. This is a SourceForge project, natch. There's a site that lets you play with all the themes for Gallery2.

Well, it seemed like a good idea.

Gallery2 has a nice php installer. You just upload it to your web site and run it. (Oh, don't forget to set the permissions.) It will actually copy the Gallery2 files to your web server, unpack them, and take you step-by-step through the install. Only one call to Globat to get the MySQL database setup. (Good support, by the way.)

So far, so good. But it was early.

The Gallery2 upload process(es), while a diverse collection, weren't nearly as smooth as my benchmark Picasa Web.

The results of the upload were pretty good. It created thumbnails and 640x480 images at the same time. Well, almost. One image of the 24 that I uploaded as a trial didn't get a thumbnail so it loaded the 4MB picture every time you went to the album page.

Some of the pictures needed to be rotated so I went into Edit Photo and rotated one. That's when I got the (first) server error. And the thumbnail went away, permanently.

It went downhill from there. The forums had lots of suggestions including recompiling the image toolkit. I don't recall having to do this with Picasa Web.

At this point, Gallery2 is pretty well hosed. Me too.