ArticlesThese notes on Gallery3 are based on a “deeper” evaluation I just performed. They should be read in conjunction with my previous notes on Gallery2.
I was a little unfair and unreasonable to the Gallery team when I did this evaluation.
You see, last time I evaluated the rather mature Gallery 2, with its broad set of plugins and person-years of stabilisation. Since then Gallery 3.0 Alpha 2 was release. It is an Alpha version of a total rewrite. It isn’t stable, it is only now going through a security review, and it is not recommended for production use.
So here is my dilemma. Check out the bug-infested, feature-lacking, plugin-barren peak into the future of the Gallery products, or spend effort on assessing how to make the wrong code-base work for my needs? What do you recommend?
I think the fair thing to do is to go with Gallery 2. If and when the Gallery 3 product is stable and has the features I need, there should be a neat migration path ready, and I can go for it.
However, to be frank, I just wanted to have a peak at the future, so I installed the Gallery 3 Alpha.
I gotta say that my first impression was “SLIIIICK!”. For example, when I uploaded my photos, it offered me the ability to use my OS’s file chooser dialog box to multi-select the files to upload. It then gave me a progress bar so I could which files were being sent! This may not sound much, but it makes all the previous frigging around with individual browse boxes per photo or the frigging around with a separate FTP client to an incoming directory seem like… umm… just frigging around.
It looks clean. It looks modular. It looks carefully thought through.
There’s still a lot of details missing though. Search didn’t find tags. I have at least one broken link to a photo. I can add a tag to a photo, but I can’t view the tags on the current photo and (thus) I can’t delete an associated tag.
When I view a photo at its largest setting, it opens it up in a separate “overlay” to fit the screen. No, I want to be able to zoom and save and stuff; give my photo to the browser to display. Wait, did you really dump a Close button onto my photo? Get your navigation shit off my piece of art!
Slightly related: please don’t arbitraily crop my photo to fit your (portrait-oriented) thumbnail ratio. Shrink? Sure, but don’t chop without my approval.
Some of the built-in modules are oddly chosen. For example, the ability to localise your own translations through the GUI? (I’m not saying it is a bad idea to choose a language through the GUI. I am not saying it is a bad idea to have localisation files available to add your own translations. But do you need a GUI to create those translation files in the Alpha version? Is that really a high-priority?)
There is a built-in plugin to an interesting third-party (beta) site called Polar Rose, that tries to do facial recognition on your photos to identify the subjects.
Of course, let’s be realistic. It is going to do a bad job of facial recognition; the technology is too unreliable, but maybe it would help more than it hindered? Well, I tried it on a few photos, and found some big UI flaws.
It asked me to name a person in a photo – and showed me a picture of a flag flapping in the wind. I don’t mind the false positive on the face. I do mind there was no button to say “This is not a face.” It maintained it in its database as an unidentified face, rather than removing it.
Similarly, it failed to recognise Bronte’s backside as Bronte. Now, I don’t expect it to automatically perform backside-recognition, but, without going into details, I can recognise Bronte’s backside. However, there was no way for me to tag it. So when Polar Rose listed the most popular people in my photos, Bronte missed out.
Again, I don’t mind that Polar Rose calculated wrong information. I objected that it provided no way to correct it.
Summary
There really wasn’t enough functionality in place for me to properly judge Gallery 3. It is slick in parts and a gaping chasm in other parts.
The fear is that a reduction in functionality in return for simplicity is part of the new design aesthetic – one that I embrace, but I seem to have slightly more complicated needs than the regular users.
I am torn between dismissing Gallery 3 as “Wait 6-12 months before using – once it is properly baked it’s likely to be really good!”, or whether to look again at Gallery 2. The fair and thorough part of me says the latter. The “Stop faffing and get it done” part of me suggests the former.
I’ll sleep on it.
Comment by Richard Atkins on March 13, 2009
One nagging questions is will there be any help in migrating from Gallery 2 to Gallery 3? If not, then your choice of version could well be a long term relationship.
Personally, I’d go with the version that captures my interest: if the new version does that, then I might be willing to put up with a few missing features temporarily, but longer term it must meet my needs. If the old version does that, then I’d need to be more accepting of its flaws, since those flaws won’t be fixed any time soon.
Of course, if the project itself is interesting enough, I might even contribute code to it… as I’m sure you would too, Julian.
Comment by Julian on March 13, 2009
They have said that there will be migration tools, but they don’t exist yet. Any theme changes, plugins or code hacks I write for my needs will need to be rewritten though.
Will the missing features appear later? Some certainly will, but it isn’t clear that they all will. I looked at their requirements document for Gallery 3, but it was just checklist of two word phrases. It is difficult to see whether it will meet my needs from that list.