[svlug] alternatives to Gallery ?

[Florin Andrei]

Thanks everyone for suggestions! If you have any other ideas, please post.

Drew Bertola wrote:
> 
> I wrote my own that does much of the same.  What's nice about creating
> static content is that it can be burned to a CD, then sent off to mom or
> dad.  All they have to do is open the index.html on the disc and start
> browsing your images.

That's a plus.

What I like about Gallery is that it's pretty much point and click. I 
need to setup a separate Gallery for my wife and, while she's smart, 
she's not a technical person.
Scripts are OK, I guess, if they're really simple to use.

Second good point for G2 is that the project is huge, has a big 
community, it interoperates with Drupal and stuff like that (or they 
plan to?).
It has lots of plugins, and for stuff like "generate a CD for mom" 
there's definitely a plugin somewhere that you can just install and use.

A pet peeve is that Gallery (and most other applications like that) do 
not seem to make sense from an interface design perspective. I want to 
dedicate a lot of screen real estate for the pictures, and keep 
everything else at a minimum.
Navigation elements should just "make sense" (a la Apple) and be 
non-intrusive and stay the heck out of the way.

What do you mean "scroll down each time after clicking Next in order to 
see the entire image"? Are you crazy? I want to be able to just click 
Next-Next-Next and not move the mouse at all! So then the portion above 
the image should be as slim as possible, so as to not obscure the bottom 
part of the image.

And what's the deal with the tiny non-obvious navigation controls? If my 
5 year old kid cannot figure it out in 10 seconds, it's basically worthless.

I hacked Gallery's Matrix theme a bit, in a bid to make it comply with 
at least some of the requirements above...

http://florin.myip.org/gallery2/main.php

...and it worked fine for a long time, but then G2 broke (no thumbnails 
anymore, but normal pictures are OK, Edit Album doesn't work anymore, no 
Apache errors, no SELinux messages - this is really screwed up) after 
upgrading the OS so I'm not sure how much you can figure out by just 
looking at it. Just imagine it still has thumbnails. :-/

I don't want to waste time fixing the damn thing. I'd rather just 
install something else, or reinstall G2 from scratch. But that means I 
need to rebuild all the albums. :-(

Hm, maybe I should just sign up with Flickr? :-)

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/