Gallery: A giant among midgets

When picking out a web-based image gallery system, the choices are almost endless: Comdev Photo Gallery, IMS Pro, PhotoStore, PhotoPost PHP Pro, Coppermine Photo Gallery, and my personal favorite: Gallery.

I recently updated my wifes web-based image gallery which was using Gallery 1.5.1. We had decided that it was looking a little bland, and might be in need of an update, so I went scouting for what was out there.

After taking the whole trip around, I ended up with Gallery again. They had recently released 2.0.0, so I decided to try it out.

I have always felt that Gallery was well designed, inside and out, but I have to say that the installation process really blew me away. It was step based and each set would tell you of any problem. For example I php's maximum script memory set to 8M. The script told me it need to be updated to 16M to run it. It was a breeze to install and about 5 minutes later I had a running version of Gallery2.

Fiddling around with the importer in about 5 more minutes. I got it to import the captions so they would work with Gallery2, and then it just had to run for about 45 minutes (importing, scaling and thumbnailing 1600 pictures).

The look is excellent, the features are great, installation is as easy as it's humanly possible, and it doesn't cost 1 cent.

You be the judge.