Topic: gallery software?

So I was thinking about getting some slick photo gallery thing for my website that would do the thumbs, comments, ranking and so on to put on my site. I found Gallery, thought it looked cool, turns out my host runs php in safe mode and won't budge on that. This seems to be a problem for most of the better looking packages that I've been able to find.

Does anybody have any recommendations for such a beast that will actually work in safe mode.. bearing in mind that I am not a coder by any stretch? If search through any more web gallery sites my eyes will fall out.

Uh, if somebody wants to stick this in server side or something that's OK. I just thought the photogs might have been here before.

Thanks in advance,
Chris

I took a quick peek at your host's knowledge base and message forum and they don't appear to offer any solution to this? Bummer if that's truly the case. I'm using a host that runs in safe mode but the offer a few different ways around it that are still secure.

Thought of changing hosts? That could get quite irritating I bet.

Jason

I just did! Gah. I don't wanna do that again already.

I've been using JAlbum for a gallery I created of photos taken at work. It creates all the pages locally, then you upload everything.

Not the best -- I'll be switching to Gallery soon -- but it may work for you.

Thanks Wes. I'll give it a better look later, I was really hoping to find something that works well on the server side but might have to go with something like this for now. Photoshop has that web photo gallery feature somewhere.. I have a couple of things bookmarked too, I need to dig through their documentation. Man, there are a lot of version 1's out there.

BTW, a word about Gallery -- I'd wait for version 2 before I got serious about it. I spent all day yesterday trying to get it to do exactly what I wanted and it was a pain in the ass.

When I started, I was under the impression that the look was based on templates. It is not. The interface is produced by the code and you've got to write or track down a patch just to tell it, for example, to display the "Taken On" dates below the thumbnails.

Plus, there's a bug -- for me, at least -- with the automatic image rotation. It offsets part of the image, wrapping about 50 pixels from the left around to the right. And the watermarking hack works, but acts funny a lot of the time.

Gallery has amazing potential, and Gallery Remote is a really terrific way to interface with it, but it's got to be more easily customizable before I'll get serious about using it.

Unfortunately, it's currently the best thing out there.

wes...drop me a mail at skaarjj@hotmail.com with you're requirements in a gallery (not image rotation though...that's a bit out of my league) and I'll see what I can work up for you.

Wes, have you looked at Coppermine? It's giving me forbidden errors at the moment but it's a nice piece of php/sql gallery ware that uses a very easy templating system, most of it's based on phpBB.

I was just about to take a demo of it down off my site, I'll leave it there a bit longer if you wanna poke through it whil chezgreg is experienceing tecjnical difficulties. Admin user/pass is krets/inger

oh yeah, it also has a fantastic remoting tool if you run XP, extremely idiot proof, I could let my granparents have a gallery with that set up, even sizes the images to a predetermined max *before* uploading them, sweet. I'm currently not finding a readme on it anywhere around my messy drives, sorry.

Jason

[This message has been edited by JKMabry (edited 09-28-2003).]

Thanks, Skaarjj, will do.

I do remember looking at Coppermine, but there was something about it I didnt like. Can't recall what it was now. Maybe had to do with only one level category ... I can't remember. And one downside is that I'm not running XP and don't really plan to, whereas Gallery has Gallery Remote, a Java app that does the same thing and works fairly well.

I just pulled down my Gallery install that had been running about a year after hearing of the last exploit that needed to be patched. I was tired of looking at the thing anyway, ugly !@#$% I liked it sorta, love hate, mostly for the hackability factors you described wes, it was rediculous.

Coppermine does fall short where gallery doesn't, and vice versa. I'm kinda anxious to see Gallery v2

Jason

I'm having similar issues finding an image-management solution. No one piece of software seems to do everything I want, the way I want it. I think I'm going to go with IMatch, though I'm highly confused about how it handles EXIF and IPTC information in relation to its own image-property fields. (Portfolio is the same way.)

Worse, it doesn't support all the EXIF properties from my Canon 10D, though a great deal of the fault lies with Canon (and many other manufacturers) for not using standard EXIF structure.

The developer has promised a redesign of how those things work in the next version, though.

Now, if I could get a good image-management solution that interfaces directly with something like Gallery, which would be customizable the way Movable Type is, then I'd be in digital heaven.