On April 1st, 2005, I read something from Gallery‘s website that there’s going to be a merger between Gallery and Coppermine Photo Gallery, I was surprised…

I went to the link. How could it be? My two favorite galleries are going to become one? They serve different communities, why merge? Coppermine forum had a thread about this, too (thread missing now). They even had a picture of it posted. The more I read about it, the more it seemed to be unreal. Then it hit me, this is an April Fool’s joke!!

Ahh!! I was not mad that I was tricked by it. But I started to get frustrated because I knew both systems and I had both of them installed on my server. I knew everything they were talking about!! That means… I am really a nerd!!

Crazy Sandy Crazy Kat… I gotta stop this madness.

This sounds familiar somehow, that I am in search and in test drive for an online photo gallery. Yes, I did the same thing to choose blogware, wiki, and forum for my website. And now I am back to the game of searching. This process is time-consuming and exhausting; I like to install and play with every single piece of program I can get my dirty hands on.

I am currently using Coppermine and I simply love it (my gallery). It is powerful, skinable, customizable, and hackable. It has very rich feature sets and a pretty well done admin page. Overall, it is definitely a “A” product.

At the same time I am using Gallery (my test gallery), which has an optional java client that you can install on your desktop for easier upload and image resize. It has a simpler interface, less intuitive admin features. But all in all, it’s more compact than Coppermine and best yet, it does not require a database.

The only complaint I have against Coppermine is how it consumes a lot of bandwidth comparing to the other programs I am evaluating now. At this point, I am playing with Simple PHP Gallery from the author of Relatively Absolute website, Enhanced Simple PHP Gallery, YaPig Image Gallery, phpAutoGallery.

I have a few objectives in mind for this time of searching: 1) simple and clean interface; 2) light and fast; 3) intuitive and easy to navigate; 4) some admin features; 5) skinable. If I have time, I will provide a bit of overview late for each one that I evaluate.

Link:
- I found this from Hostcripts.com, which gives me a list of galleries to consider from
- Google also gives quite some sources to look at. Google Directory on Image Gallery