OddThinking

Which requirements does Gallery2 meet?

Summary

Gallery2 surprised me by being much better than I expected.

You see, last year, I did a quick and dirty evaluation of the self-hosted open-source solutions. Eventually, I decided I hadn’t given the decision enough thought, and returned to do this more formal evaluation (including third-party hosted solutions)

During that early evaluation, I looked at Gallery2, spurned it, and chose Coppermine instead. I can’t remember the reasons, but when I went to evaluate it again, I was expecting to stumble across some fatal flaw that I saw last time.

However, I didn’t. Gallery2 seems quite robust and feature-rich. It doesn’t fail any of the critical requirements and is in with a decent chance.

Like all of the self-hosted solutions, it gains big points by letting me own everything.

It offers a large range of plugins, so some of the Ns may turn out to be Ys. (Bonus points for the plugin installation process: painless!)

I find the default theme to be a little cluttered; lots of irrelevant text drawing focus from the photos. It has a lot of customisation options that somewhat helped. Some of the options sounded good, but didn’t appear to have any effect; I need to do more research there.

I can see that some theme tweaking is going to be required.

Tagging is done with a separate plugin. The question of “Are tags space-delimited?” was neatly side-stepped. They aren’t by default, but this can be easily changed. I had two issues with the tagging. Firstly, the “add tag” feature it is made too prominent; it is more clutter per photo. The other is there isn’t a way to let anonymous (or registered) users be allowed to nominate tag additions or deletions. you can only give them full control or none.

Aside from that plugin issue, the permissions model is very robust. Registered users can be granted access to albums. Groups are also available, to simplify such administration.

I didn’t see any way for users to register themselves; it has to be done by an admin. I reckon there’s a good chance that a plugin exists for that. Self-registration is handled by a standard plugin, but I did not try it.

The slideshow feature worked fine but included a surprise advert for some sort of advertising-funded slideshow plugin. Ugh, that has to go!

I cannot see why I eschewed this for Coppermine.

EDIT: Corrected question about self-registration. It is handled by a standard plug-in, which I did not test.