2.26.06
zenphoto's gallery
Getting pictures online has always been a desire of mine. Back in 2004, I finally took the time to get Gallery up and running. Over the years, it's more than served its purpose, but alas, it's time to move on.
While browsing through DSLR member's blogs, I came across Will Chatham's site and noticed he was using a gallery system called zenphoto. I was immediately awe struck.
It's clean and feels "light". And, unlike Gallery, the backend code is fairly simple to hack. There is an AJAX gui in the administration screen that allows drag-n-drop manipulation of your albums.
What I like the most, though, is being able to drop a folder right into the "albums" directory and have zenphoto list it and create thumbnails on the fly. No more going through a "process" to get your images online. The focus behind the zenphoto project seems to be getting your content out so it can be enjoyed, and it does that well.
That can also be seen as a downside, since there is no heavy image manipulation available (yet). Other potential downsides are the requirement of a database and, initally, zenphoto is pretty CPU intensive. Since thumbs and cropped images are created on the fly, the gd_lib are called to resize images the first time they are requested. From then on, a cache folder stores 100megs (by default, and changable) of the adjusted images for quicker displaying.
The current version is Beta 1.01. Quite worth checking out if you're interested in a change.
1:20 pm in updates | 1 person viewing0 ramblings so far