Searching for the perfect gallery wasn’t so easy. First I step upon Gallery 2 , it is a great software, and when I say “great” it really is. It’s very powerful, but it also comes with huge installation and file system and requires strong server power to run a fairly small gallery (at least to my experience). I tried it on my website and uploaded about 500 pictures, I had problems with it creating thumbnails for new pictures. so what happend? I gave up.
Then, it comes the famous, everyone is using it, Flickr. Very nicely designed, user-friendly with millions of api-apps that makes it even more versatile.
The problem I have with it is non-technical, and is more personal:
1. I am already paying 4 dollar a month for my hosting services, and it comes with 120GB of space, why should I pay another 3 dollar just to host my pictures online? (yes, call me cheap)
2.It used to be just one issue, but now since China’s Great Firewall blocked access to Flickr’s Photo (very clever, you can still access Flickr.com, but you won’t be able to see the pictures).
Given the reasons above, I had to say, though Flickr is great, it is obsolete for me.
My search continues on, and Zenphoto I found. It’s simple, light and clean designed. It doesn’t have many function as Gallery, nor do you find much plug-in for it, but at least I get to host photo on my own hosting server.
The installation was easy, just download the zip file and upload the folder to your web server. Then edit the zp-config.php with your database information. Then just run the /zen/setup.php, then you are good to go. Uploading photo was easy, you can use the admin interface or you can upload using FTP (my favorite).
A few downside: if you want sub-album, you can only create it from FTP’s actual file structure, and there are very few plug-in you can find, so it’s just a simple straight forward gallery.
You can see the demo gallery that I installed on my site that took me only a few minute.
But it satisfies me…. for now.
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