Why Gallery2

Recently I have been a quest to determine which or what application to use for setting up a Web Photo Gallery on my home server. I decided on Gallery2. I just wanted to share some of the background info I discovered and share why I chose what I chose.

What I Wanted

I was looking for a method to share my photos with others.

Provide a backup or second location for storing my photos. (This came later at the suggestion of my friend Casey King)

Low maintenance application.

Local storage. (Let's face it I'm cheap and I don't want to pay for someone else to host my photos)

What I Tried

Most of what I looked at were freeware applications that could generate web pages. I tried JAlbum, Jet Photo, Pica Photo, Thumbsplus, and others. The most common trait that I discovered is that all of these applications wanted to generate static html pages. Initially I thought that would be fine. However on a second consideration I realized that with static pages I would have to generate new pages everytime I changed or added anything to my gallery.

Some of the applications were just hard to get to work. I had an extremely rough time trying to get PHP (a Web Scripting Language) to work on a IIS server. I still don't have it working on the IIS portion of one of my home servers. I found much more success getting it to run on my Apache server.

What I Liked

One aspect of Gallery2 that I liked was that it was a total Photo Web Gallery solution that was designed to be run on your own server. It was not a set of static HTML pages. It was a server that could generate Thumbnails on the fly and adjust to changes in the file structure. It had built in user resources and a huge community for support and plug in development.

There are a myriad of Themes to choose from and each one is customizable. I like that if I change or move file or directory that I don't have to regenerate pages. I can control the look and feel of each page.

As the system imports new Photos it has the smart to read the keywords stored in the JPG files. These keywords are search able. Someone using the system can quickly search for all of the pictures of a particular person, or all the images of elephants. It is there to be searched and it is relatively fast.

The system also allows the ranking of photos by visitors. Not a critical part of the system but a big plus. The gallery can also sort each album using different criteria one of which is the photo rating.