New Gallery

As promised, I put up a photo gallery last night. There were a number of features that I really wanted in my gallery, so I searched long and hard for a good gallery program.

The features I wanted (in order from most important to least important) were:

• FAST – The gallery MUST be fast and easy to use
• Easy album creation – I don’t want to create albums through a GUI, I want to drop a folder onto my webserver and the album is automatically created
• Photo commenting – I want people to be able to comment on pictures
• Sub-albums – I want to have a hierarchical structure of albums
• Show new images – I want a quick way for visitors to find newly added pictures
• Show new comments – I want a quick way for visitors to find pictures with newly added comments

And so on with the losers:

• G2 Gallery – The default install with my webhost, very full featured but WAY too slow.
• Photoframe – a simple PHP script that intrigued me until I noticed that you could not link to specific files (the URL always stays the same while different images are viewed). Also, does not handle multiple albums well.
• SPGM – Looked like it was easy to set up, but doesn’t allow comments on pictures.
• JAlbum – Nice looking, but again no comments on pictures.
• Linpha – Seemed slowish, kind of ugly.

The two that looked promising were:

• Coppermine – Another big program, has all of the features I want but looks pretty complicated which probably means lots of configuration
• ZenPhoto – A small lightweight program that looked easy to setup and configure. Does not have all of the features I want, but enough of them to make it interesting.

So, because ZenPhoto looked easier to try out than Coppermine, I installed it last night. So far I like it because it’s so simple, but it is missing some of the features that I want such as sub-albums (actually sub-albums are in beta and looks like they’ll be added soon), show new images and show new comments. It might be possible to at least show the number of comments per picture on the thumbnail screens if I develop my own template, but I’ll have to look at it…

So, without further ado, please checkout my trial album at http://lessthanme.com/photos. Leave a comment, try it out, let me know what you think of it. I suspect that I will still give Coppermine a shot to see if I can get all my wants with minimal hassle. But if Coppermine looks big and nasty, then ZenPhoto it is!