I’m in the middle of trying to install Gallery, which is an open source photo gallery program. Cool stuff, and a lot of folks on the web use it.
Unfortunately, it suffers from most Open Source programs’ woes …
- The documentation is okay (better than a lot of Open Source programs, in fact), but still woefully inadequate to the wide array of systems that it might be installed on.
- The documentation assumes a technical expertise that some folks don’t have. Processes in the installation and configuration that should be automated aren’t (e.g., CHMODding files and directories back and forth between secure production mode and scratching-your-head configuration mode). Indeed, most stuff that involves installing stuff on web servers is like this, as is anything else that involves cross-OS knowledge.
- There’s a robust support forum that is used to make up for the documentation and variety of installation circumstances. Unfortunately, that’s like trying to go into a large medical convention and find the conversation going on about the precise condition you’re suffering from; it’s possible, but you go through a lot of dead ends.
That all being said, I’m still positive about the program and getting it to work — eventually. But it really harkens back to the days of installing stuff in DOS and figuring out the drug interractions there, only about cubed. Nothing is ever as simple as it sounds like it should be, and the little conveniences that modern desktop users (Win or Mac) are accustomed to — installation and deinstallation packages, for example — are nearly non-existent.
Ah, well. Enough kvetching.
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From the ever helpful Scoot: http://forums.hostmatters.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=9460&highlight=netpbm+path
That said, Gallery both sucks and blows, proving you get what you pay for. If you have $49 burning a hole in your pocket, the Albinator is verrrry slick.
I’ve seen Scott’s forum post (and have it printed out). There are several on the HM forums with little tidbits of info, in addition to the Gallery forum. Problem is, at least one thing he says there seems to not work in my installation (one of my list of things to do is to continue that discussion thread).
Granted that Gallery is free (raising the question of how much one’s time is worth). It certainly has much following on the Web, though that might be part and parcel of it being, well, free.
Okay, the flip side to these things is that you can have a sudden breakthrough. I used the Albinator “are you ready for this package” tool, which led me to a different HM forum on the subject, and it turned out that led me to the answer.
So, things are tentatively happy at the moment. But I’m going to play with Gallery a bit before I go into “production” with it, and look at Albinator.
Huh. Looked at Albinator. Hokey Smoke, have they ever heard of a copy editor? I mean, jeez, I know that programming expertise does not necessarily go together with grammar and spelling, but presentation quality is at least some clue as to production quality.
Aside from that, I’m not seeing much featurewise that Gallery doesn’t provide that I’m interested in. I’m not going to be reselling album space (!). I wouldn’t mind better template control, but that’s about it.
I was using gallery on my “family” page (http://jenkinsonline.net/) and dropped it recently due to it being a major pain in the ass in some respects. Once you get it set up and working right it’s pretty cool, but if you should need to change something or if some problem develops it goes back to being a royal pain in the ass. Too much work for what it does.
I’ve since replaced it with Coppermine which you can see in action at http://photos.jenkinsonline.net/ in case you’re interested. Definitely easier to work with, though it does require a mySQL database which Gallery does not. Also missing sub-albums, but overall a much better package in my mind.
Ironically, Les, it was your mention of dropping Gallery for Coppermine that got me back into the project. I looked at Coppermine, but decided I didn’t care for its features as much. If Gallery blows up on me, of course, I may change my mind. 🙂
This is, after all, the country that invented the DIY. After finishing the Gallery project, would you share with us?
Absolutely.
Wow, that is pretty ironic. Gallery has some nice stuff in it, but beware the dreaded SETUP directory. One of the things you have to do to move Gallery from “config” mode into “operational” mode is chmod the SETUP directory to 000. Well, not sure how, but when trying to go back into config mode so I could upgrade the script I found that I couldn’t chmod the SETUP directory back to 777 like you’re supposed to. Ended up installing the whole package again into a new directory to get the upgrade to work. Then I could delete everything in the old installation directory EXCEPT for the setup directory. When this happened a second time (again when going to upgrade the script) I said to hell with it.
And I still have two directories on my account that are empty except for a SETUP directory that I can’t delete and can’t chmod. If you’re running your server yourself this probably won’t be an issue, but it’s what convinced me that as nice as Gallery is it’s odd way of handling configuration issues and the pain it was getting it to work right wasn’t worth it. 🙂 YMMV. Good luck!
The manual CHMODding of directories between configuration and secure is a little odd.
I was unable to do a CHMOD of 000 in my FTP client, but I found a source that said that setting it to 700 was okay (or even preferred).
I have an obsolete partial directory out there from an earlier failed Gallery install, though it was actually the albums directory with files I couldn’t delete or CHMOD. Weird.
But, so far, it’s working for me, knock on wood.