Apollo Hosting- Company Blog

No clue as to why voting's on my mind today, but for some reason I'll choose it as a theme around which to wrap an overview of some common image gallery software. The candidates are Coppermine and Gallery. Both respected candidates with reasonably long histories. Which one should you elect to your website? Well, as those sports bumpers go, "You make the call!"

As with many elections, there are quite a few third party candidates out there, representing many perfectly valid points of view, as well as the vast and varied colors of the lunatic fringe. We'll need to discuss one fringe candidate, one with a siren call that some might just heed, unknowing the ultimate ruin that will lie ahead. I speak of the "do-it-yourself" gallery candidate.

The Fringe Vote: Myself

It might seem like a good idea, taking complete creative control of your gallery and crafting it from the ground up to merge seamlessly with your website. In certain, highly limited cases, that may well be. Firing up Photoshop to build your graphics, make neat thumbnails, and whipping it all together in Dreamweaver can certainly create a visually appealing experience for the user. But the end user is not the one slaving over a hot Photoshop and Dreamweaver every time the gallery needs to be updated or changed.

It's a question of convenience and speed. Many gallery apps, including our two major party candidates here, can create thumbnails and resize images on the fly, and reorganizing them is far easier online than juggling table cells by hand in Dreamweaver. If you do have fairly static galleries, ones you rarely, preferably never, expect to change- ever- then go ahead and do all the hand coding you want.

Those who want to get pictures online fast and with a decent, functional interface will be using some kind of gallery application. Part of the reason I chose to do this gallery application overview is that I was recently in a similar situation, faced with a choice of such apps. My only initial certainty was the need for one. Which, was the real question. The previous gallery was in, of all things, Flash. Sounds a bit counter-intuitive to most sane individuals, and it was.

This wasn't even great Flash. That kind of Flash you look at, and, even though you still hate it on principle alone, you can at least congratulate it for appearing really, really cool. Pointless... but cool. No, this was mediocre, at best. So the overhaul was to begin, and, due completely to name recognition alone, I decided to choose between Coppermine and Gallery.

Candidate 1- Coppermine

My needs were actually pretty basic. I wanted a quick, convenient way to organize photos into albums with a nod towards the unending stream of future "add/remove" requests I knew was coming. Both Gallery and Coppermine fit this bill in spades, there's no doubt about that. I didn't need other users, or even people entering comments, this was very basic stuff.

This is probably why Coppermine took the hit. Visiting their site I knew I was looking at something targeted to the programmatically savvy out there, not the simple pixel pushers such as myself. Further, having used Coppermine galleries "casually," I never cared for the default pop-up window functionality to view the full sized image. It lends itself to some very cluttered desktops, or monstrous window sizes if the image is large enough. I've even had that problem running at 1600x1200 from time to time.

I'm not saying "don't use Coppermine", just that it didn't seem to be right for what I was doing this time. It has a features list a few yards long, and if you need one of the more esoteric on that list, then it's probably right for your job. Coppermine, like Gallery, is built with an eye towards public photo-sharing and community. This really wasn't my goal. I just needed people to be able to browse a gallery and view some photos.

Candidate 2- Gallery

Thus I felt a little more comfy on Gallery's site. It's very "Web 2.0". Not that that makes any difference to me, as I'm not all that sure what it means. I have figured out it involves pastels, light gradients, and large fonts. That last part has to do with that holiest of grails, accessibility. The upshot of all their Web2.0y-ness is their app is XHTML 1.0 Strict and validates perfectly. Again, I'm no zealot, but I do feel it incumbent upon hairy knuckle-draggers such as myself to keep up with the times.

Since I was doing work on one of our fine Plesk hosting products here at Apollo, installation was a breeze via the Application Vault. It would have been a similar breeze for Coppermine, as well. I found the admin straightforward and easy to use. I say that with some recognition I'm reasonably attuned to this sort of stuff. Your experience may well vary if you've never poked around an open-source browser-based web application before.

My initial instinct was just to bulk upload and organize online. In Gallery, one can bulk import from a remote URL, or from a directory within the local site. Turns out I wasn't really thinking all that clearly, so I eventually ended up doing it the "old fashioned way," via the browser based upload form. It can do 4 images at a time, which, yes, isn't all that many, but I finally settled on setting up a detailed album structure first, then uploading to the albums individually. Once that was accomplished, there weren't that many individual shots destined for the many separate individual galleries, making "4-at-a-time" not so big a deal.

[Correction: A helpful member of the Gallery team posted, and I have visually verified, there is a little "More..." link under that #4 spot, which, when repeatedly clicked, will allow up to 20 images to be uploaded at a single time via the browser. As the postcard from my optometrist so ably reminded me, I do need new glasses.]

Since utility was my ultimate goal, I went about modifying the sturdy default template to rip out all those extra bits like comments, etc. My recommendation would be to set up your template the way you want first, then all your subsequent albums will inherit the defaults you setup. I selfishly replaced the "Gallery" logo image with a small themed graphic, did a little album rearranging, and was done. Now, going forward, I just have a few quick steps to upload new images, or delete the old.

Conclusions

The results of my little election were pretty clear, and required no interference from other branches of... myself. In all, Gallery was a good experience, reminiscent of the heady first days of stumbling through b2Evolution, which powers this very blog. We should all be so happy with our "elected officials." I suppose you could do an HTML "blog" by hand, just like a gallery, but very talented people have provided these tools to make all our lives easier.

Oh, and I simply have to give kudos to folks who developed Gallery for, well, calling it "Gallery." Sometimes you can tell when there were no "marketing guys" in the room. I look forward to the day when Ford comes out with "Car", Procter & Gamble announces "Soap", and Nabisco finally releases "Food."