I just finished transferring the few photos here from a “shoebox” powered by Pixelpost to a gallery powered by… Gallery. 2. Since the season of exploring is upon us and since my grandbaby is doing more and more things to wow his fan base family, the camera is probably going to be getting quite a workout. I wanted something a bit more featureful for organizing and displaying the photos. That something had to be running on my own domain, rather than our personal photos being uploaded to an external image hosting service.

Pixelpost excels as a small, open source photoblog program. I’ve used it for a long time and been happy with only having to edit two template files to get it to fit in with the rest of my site. It also hasn’t gobbled up any server resources to speak of. But these things come with a drawback. The template files are in sometimes stagnant HTML, not PHP. So it’s not as easily dynamic or interactive as it would otherwise be. It also doesn’t come with many stock features, and there are few plugins, compared with other programs. It became cumbersome for me to organize albums. For instance, when viewing an album, a visitor might click to view the next picture and be promptly escorted to a different album, based on the order in which the photos had been uploaded. Even the calendar didn’t display quite the way I would have liked, and adding pagination to a template wasn’t very intuitive.

I’d still recommend Pixelpost to someone looking for a very lightweight photoblog. For this, it’s the best.

For a full featured photo gallery, Gallery is an excellent application. It is also open source. This program takes more effort than PixelPost to set up. There are many optional settings and plugins that come stock with the program download and can be activated as the user needs them. I wasn’t happy about having to work with Smarty templates to get it to match my site. It’s not bad once you flush the tables down the toilet and get used to wrapping php code in {php} tags instead of <?php, and javascript code in {literal} tags- lol! There are a few more template files than those of Pixelpost, but unlike many other programs, they are all in the theme folder. A user doesn’t have to search through directory under directory of core code, wondering how to change every last little. Of course, a user might just decide to go with one of the great themes that are included.

The best part is the features. Each album can be displayed completely differently from the others, from layout to menus to the order of the pictures. It’s truly dynamic. Also, when a visitor browses an album, he won’t get dumped suddenly into a different set of images. The stock plugins cover everything I need now and might possibly think about implementing in the future. There are several methods of importing images and even more plugins for exporting them.

Now there is a much more comfortable home waiting for the new pictures we’re sure to take.