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Gallery2 vs Coppermine or the others. Over a 3 weeks period of various installs of differing CMS and Blog packages I review in total the top 5 gallery software offerings.
In the end in came down to between Coppermine or Gallery2. Both had
good features but in the end I had to choose one. My decision was swayed by two things, what were they?....
If you have not checked it out have a look here for the implementation, and if you read this after sept 2006 then check out the mini articles in each photo; Gallery2 and Joomla Integration
First up I am an open source advocate so anything I use will have to be open source. I like the freedom to modify the code to do exactly what I want. So all commercial photo galleries wer instantly ruled out.
I wanted something that would look professional and act professional, two of the others I tried had small bugs - like displaying the wrong photo when you clicked on a thumbnail. No way. Disqualified. The other one was just ugly.
Sorry I needed something that worked and is fully featured and has a working community that I can get help from. That scratched the commercial offering.
Another popular website gallery package that is supposed to be good is in German. Non English website scratch that one. That left me with Gallery2 or Coppermine.
The deciding factors that first swayed my decision of Gallery2 vs. coppermine were;
- Gallery Remote - Java program that you can run on your
computer that resizes and ads caption, description and summary to each
photo before you upload. I load the pics straight from my camera and
they are resized exactly on the fly, very quick to throw up even a
dozen photos with large descriptions, in effect turning them into mini
articles.
- Better integration in Joomla and Wordpress.
Gallery becomes a part of Joomla, especially the way I am using it.
There is no discernable seperation once I finish the galleries, users can be logged into Joomla (Mambo too)and have the same access rights in Gallery2
It is still quiet messy (aug 2006), esp with the big google ads in the
gallery, but I make a much better CTR with that ugly style.I am
experimenting to get it to look good, next I am going to take snippets
out of the related content and paste them into the description of each
photo with a link back to the article.
This brings the gallery
further into the content and removes the seperation for the user. I
hate the sites where people have unimaginative heres my photo albums
pages and it is different formating different css, just ugly and
amateur night - sorry but if you want people to look at your site then
they should notice your content, not your layout (or lack of).
You can do a lot with a little imagination.
The best thing is even at this point I could still pull Gallery2 if I did not like it and implement Coppermine without to much fuss. Except for one thing - it works, it works with Joomla, developers are working on Gallery2 continually and developers are working bringing the two even closer.
Gallery2 is everything I need, there is nothing more that I have yet decided that I need from a Photo Gallery.
Coppermine was fully featured, in fact the feature sets are very similar. I installed both and ran them side by side, if I was going to run a stand alone photo album website then I would probably have chosen Coppermine over Gallery2 due to the thumbnail navigation that I preferred. But as I run Joomla (and others with Mambo will be in the same boaat) the integration provided by "gallery2 bridge" component and it's assorted modules and mambots just made it an alround more integrated solution for me.
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