A Bad Photo Opportunity
April 22nd, 2010 by ComputerBob
At last weekend’s charity fundraiser, I shot over 125 photos and more than 10 short videos.
A few years ago, I used Plogger software to create a photo gallery to display all of my photos on the charity’s Web site.
But Plogger turned out to be way more trouble than it was worth. If you only use your gallery software once each year, it has to be easy and uncomplicated enough that you can figure out how to use it year after year.
Plogger was a pain to try to figure out and troubleshoot each year.
So a few years ago, I switched to using Gallery2 software.
And converted all of the previous Plogger galleries into Gallery2 galleries.
Gallery2 was pretty complicated, with lots of tabs and menus and sub-menus to navigate and configure, so I had to re-upload my photos and reconfigure its settings several times before I was able to get it to display my photos and thumbnails correctly.
Last year, I used Gallery2 again. It was just as complicated and just as difficult to get it to work as it had been the year before — even though I had written down each of the steps that I had finally figured out the year before.
This year, I tried to use Gallery2 for the third year in a row. But no matter what I tried, it refused to display any thumbnails or normal-sized images. It only displayed each individual, normal-sized image if I clicked on each broken thumbnail image.
I spent a few hours doing Google searches, but the best solution I can find is in the Gallery2 FAQ, but it tells me to make some specific changes in a configuration page that doesn’t even exist in my particular Gallery2 installation, which I originally installed through Fantastico De Luxe in my Web hosting CPanel.
Unacceptable. Completely unacceptable.
So I just spent the past 9 1/2 hours looking for a suitable online gallery software package for Linux, to replace
Gallery2.
I’ve looked at over 20 possibilities, including everything from several embarrassingly “Programming 101″ galleries to Coppermine and several of the other mega-gallery packages, but those professional galleries have many, many confusing configuration options and features and settings than I would ever need, so it just isn’t worth having to learn how to install, configure and use any of them.
In the meantime, a few hundred people have been waiting for almost the past week, for me to publish my photos and videos of last Sunday’s charity event.
Once I’ve figured out what I’m going to use, and I’ve gotten this year’s charity photos online with whatever that new package turns out to be, I’ll have to think about whether I want to go to all the trouble of converting all of the previous years’ galleries to the new software, or whether I’ll just leave all of them in Gallery2 and have two different types of galleries from now on.
I’m really sick of having to find a new photo gallery software package every year or two; having to learn how to install it and get it to work; having to convert all of my previous years’ photos to the new gallery; and having to figure out how to edit cryptic config files to try to make the gallery pages look the same as all of the other Web pages on the charity’s Web site.
If you know a lot about Linux photo gallery software, please contact me. I’m looking for an easy, simple online photo gallery solution that will work for me year after year to display a few hundred images, and that falls somewhere between the GUI-controlled, professional galleries that offer hundreds of confusing features and settings, and the command-line-driven, spartan, ugly, buggy, amateur, pre-beta-release galleries that don’t come with any useful documentation.
It shouldn’t be this hard to find something like that.
Sheesh.
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