Introduction

As you know by now Gallery 3 Photo engine is hibernating. I decided to explore alternatives. Please note that unless I comfortable, I will be keeping my main gallery live while building up pieces using my new engine of choice.

As a long time G2/G3 user and seasoned plugin and theme developer for Gallery for past many years, while have a sad feeling, I have wisdom of knowing how things work and what to expect.

In this series, I will be posting my short notes on my experience migrating my photo site to new engine.

Considerations

  • Ideally 1:1 replacement – which means…
  • Keep it private, private … Ability to host locally, i.e. gallery engine is not linked to any particular host or OS. LAMP or WAMP stack.
  • Ability to create custom themes (everyone wants to be unique or at least have variety of choices how gallery looks like)
  • Ability to create plugins. I would expect gallery engine to have number of plugins already available, but I do want to have ability to customize/extend it further nevertheless
  • Ability to move my content with as little effort as possible (local import, self organizing of the files)
  • Light resource requirement. Ability to import large photos.
  • and ability to use shared hosing which
  • Not as important for me, but should allow multilingual support
  • Image and Video upload support
  • User, User groups and permission setup

“Shared” Solutions

there are plenty of “shared” photo storages on the market and “public” storage is ok for you take a look at the following:

  • http://www.shutterfly.com/
  • https://www.flickr.com/
  • http://www.snapfish.com/
  • http://www.smugmug.com/
  • off course, you can always use FB for the whole world to see and for FB to monetize 🙂
  • Or Google flavored – Picasa

“Local” Choices

There are many around, but I would consider

Making personal choice

In the end it all comes to personal choice, so take it with the grain of salt and evaluate if solution works for you…

WordPress

For few years now WP has Photo Gallery support. It is blog integrated and is very simple to use and customize. However if you have large number of photos to post this option may not work for you.
Being familiar with WP and using it as a blog engine but as  I am not planning to merge my blog and my photo gallery, I am going to skip on reviewing it here.

ZenPhoto

I was keeping eye on the project for some time and I do like it. Project is well established and have plenty of plugins and themes.

Install was  easy and I was able to import most of my photos… until large files were to be processed… and it failed… Turns out ImageMagic with my shared hosting just did not have enough juice to be able process images even on basic level to extract metadata.

Please note that it could be a that there are some tweaks required (I did some changes in G3 for it to work in the same scenario, but this is exactly what I am trying to avoid in my review process).

Bummer… so I would still recommend to take a look at ZenPhoto and consider it as a possible solution for you… but for me, I am moving on…

Coppermine

Well established, but too “old-looking”. This project is still going strong and active, but to my taste it is “legacy” solution. While it still have a lot of nice features, way it is organized is just not for me.

Piwigo

If you do not mind French here and there, take a close look at this little beauty. 🙂

Let’s look at my checklist above:

  • It is not 1:1 replacement, but close enough
  • I can host locally on the LAMP stack without changing hosting
  • I can inherit or create custom themes. In fact, it is somewhat easier with Piwigo
  • I can create plugins and there is plenty of existing one.
  • Local import and self organizing of the files is supported
  • Light resource requirement. Ability to import large photos.
  • I can keep my shared hosting
  • Multilingual support
  • Image and Video upload support (additional plugins may be required)
  • User, User groups and permission setup

Now the experience:

  • Deployment was a breeze – you can do full code deployment or use “pull” method and all components would be downloaded for you, you just need to deploy one file and setup your database. Rest will be done during setup.
  • I have uploaded my var folder from G3 and run Sync. All photos (2000+) was imported into gallery tree and appear in the gallery. No hiccups, no resource issues.
  • There is G2 import plugin you can install and try. It may even take G3 photos, but I did not try it. If G3 is the issue, someone may try to adjust G2 version to take G3 content especially if you have a good amount of metadata you need to bring across. I opted out to import images only.
  • Aside from few default themes installed by default, you can pull number of other themes from repository along with various plugins. There might be some things missing which I am used to with G3, but I do not consider it an issue as I can migrate missing parts myself.
  • If you are looking for GreyDragon Theme – I started process of migrating it over Piwigo and will make it available in next month or so. If you’d like to help testing it, please let me know. Just do not expect full port immediately.
  • If you are looking for any of my plugins which do not have equivalent at Piwigo already, please let me know and I will consider the port.

Extras:

  • There is a code repository if you like to have access to raw stuff
  • Along with bug tracking system
  • Looking for ideas for your new gallery look, visit showcase section.

Americans beware, or not 🙂

Piwigo is started by Pierrick Le Gall, French and you would find some number of posts or plugin’s descriptions in French.

Do not be discouraged by this 🙂 people in Europe can speak 2-3 languages fluently and usually English is one of them. So have question or two, visit forum and ask.

PS/Edit: Read above with smile. How Pierrick highlighted in his comment below, Piwigo is international project and anyone will feel right at home regardless what language they speak.

Conclusion

I have moved my gallery to Piwigo.

You can follow visit this blog for more details as I will be posting updates and in some near future will be making GreyDragon available for testing and then official download.

Follow-ups

Subscribe for Twitter feed at @greydragon_th to be informed about Theme development.


96 Comments

Ed · Jul 23, 2014 at 07:20

I have migrated my site over to Piwigo, A simple task copy all photos and sync. I than ran a simple sql script which copied the names and descriptions over. Any one interested I will try to remember the script.
Thanks for the article.

    Eivind · Aug 12, 2014 at 05:31

    Hi Ed. Could you please share your script? I would love to easily copy names, descriptions and possibly also the click counts over.

undagiga · Jul 23, 2014 at 17:17

As I said on the G3 forum, I greatly respect your judgement on these matters and am likely to follow you. But I have one particular requirement – dynamic galleries based on keywords. Are you able to say whether piwigo (or zenphoto) has this, either natively or via a module?

Manolo · Aug 5, 2014 at 01:02

I am also migrating 🙁

Thanks Serge for the report on experiences. The only problem I am facing is the management of videos.

I admit that in G3 I also had troubles to configure ffmpeg… I have tried in piwigo with video-js, but I have not succeded.

Besides in G3 any video got a thumbnail, even the ones that were not able to be played…

Have you found any problem with the videos? It is really the only thing I am missing to fully migrate…

Thanks in advance

    Serguei Dosyukov · Aug 5, 2014 at 09:21

    I am not heavy video user, but there are few discussions on the forum on the subject along with few plugins. If plugins and/or info discussed do not solve problem you are facing, try submitting your question to the forum.
    Sorry I could not help you more

PolyWogg · Aug 14, 2014 at 18:39

Nice overview, and my experience in reviewing each of them is pretty similar:

– WordPress – there are a couple of galleries that create separate album areas rather than dumping them in the media folder, so they are a bit more manageable, but the interface within those plugins is pretty rudimentary…the power of the WP media library is great, but if you’ve got 500 photos or more, gets unwieldy fast;

– ZenPhoto looked good, but then I started running into conflicts when I had multiple plugins running, and it wasn’t clear if the large sizes were the problem or not…plus, I’m trying to find a solution where I can “embed” a video stored on Google Drive (my server doesn’t allow direct streaming from it, so have to store it somewhere else, and was hoping to avoid the FB/Google+/Picasa/issues of hosting there in private mode and trying to connect them);

– Coppermine looks a bit oldschool, but I haven’t given up on it yet…a functioning history is pretty hard to beat; and,

– Piwigo meets most of my needs, so I think it will be the winner. I’m comforted by the fact that you reviewed it too and were impressed with it…unfortunately, I don’t have your mad adaptation skills — if it doesn’t work out of the box, I probably ain’t gonna be getting it to work no way, no how 🙂

Fingers crossed…I’m going in!

PolyWogg

Chris · Aug 16, 2014 at 14:28

So, I found your post on the G3 site and have followed you to Piwigo…

After ~48 hours with it – it’s fully setup after moving everything, generating thumbs, adding your theme, etc.

What just caused me to tank with piwigo… the stupid virtual albums.

I use my site as a backup and sort platform for my images… basically, parent/child folder structure.

Piwigo will only add new pictures to a virtual album with all images in one folder… and will not add it to the “galleries” folder.

http://piwigo.org/doc/doku.php?id=user_documentation:albums_management

I’m out of Piwigo… going to try Zen or coppermine.

    Chris · Aug 16, 2014 at 14:38

    Let me further clarify for those that read here and not the documentation 😉

    The web uploader in piwigo won’t put folders into the galleries folders, only into the “virtual” directory.

    The way they expect you to manage it if you want to keep your physical albums is to FTP the files into your galleries directories and then “sync” your gallery to the database to make them show in the gallery.

    Silly if you ask me… and certainly not user friendly in my opinion.

      Serguei Dosyukov · Aug 20, 2014 at 17:55

      As user of G3, we are accustomed for album level upload structure.
      Spending years with G3 I often would run into issues using Uploader process. I probably can attribute it to my theme but I never was able to make it work consistently. In my case I would get photos which are uploaded but not processed, i.e. metadata and resizes are not built completely and maintenance task would usually not help.
      So for better or worse, I personally prefer FTP upload as easier option and less stressful for the server.
      Please note that such method is not always available to end user, so having proper web method is always a necessity.
      I would probably encourage Piwigo team to consider improving existing method if “folder-level” limit is in fact a limitation and not simply not documented feature.

        flop25 · Aug 20, 2014 at 22:48

        Hello
        Many things are documented in each Piwigo Check the Help button and Add photo ->Ftp
        There is currently two ways for uploading and one was kept as this for “legacy users”.
        Further great and big improvement would be to merge them

        Rhyull · Aug 21, 2014 at 09:35

        I have consistently had problems with G3 uploader. Example it rarely worked for Mac users. So having an FTP option to upload direct into albums and create albums by uploading a new folder is something I consider a benefit. I do, however, still need to put in a practical test and check on the suitability of Piwigo in a multi-user environment. So I wouldn’t advise others to use my comments as an endorsement at this stage.

      Muug · Sep 2, 2014 at 00:22

      So if you let your friends use your Piwigo to create their own albums all their pictures are put in one giant folder!?!?!? That really is a stupid idea. I mean, you can’t expect every computer user to be capable of doing ftp uploads!

        Chris · Sep 2, 2014 at 19:40

        I’m still fighting this stupidity myself…

        Lots of fun plugins… I was just demoing a LightRoom plugin… the uploads go to the upload folder and not into my galleries folder (galleries is where you FTP then sync your gallery from).

        I’d love to see PiwiGo change, or at the very least give the option to structure more to the way Gallery3 does…

        Managing my folders / syncs and backups is now a nightmare.

        They (piwi) put the thumbnails, etc in a folder inside the main albums, rather than a separate directory structure like G3… piwi looks more like G1 or maybe G2 if I can remember that far back :p

        My rsync command line is getting retardedly long at this point…. –exclude has become my friend.

          Chris · Sep 3, 2014 at 06:43

          I should clarify my word “stupidity” above – although PiwiGo doesn’t do it the way that *I* want it to work (and it appears many others), I’m sure that there was a decision made somewhere in the history of PiwiGo as to why they did that. Direct file access / file guessing (although that isn’t an issue with a properly configured web server)

          And again to clarify my statements above, thumbs are stored in a _data folder, but what I’m confused on is why there is a folder in the “galleries” album, sub albums called “pwg_representative” – it contains even more thumb nails for the video clips.

          I would have expected to have those also in the _data folder.

          All in all… I actually killed my G3 installation last night. I’m all in for PiwiGo…

          There are a few modules that I miss already. Unfortunately I have absolutely no programming talent – I mean, absolutely NONE.

          G3 had a module that would show PHPbb/HTML links to various image sizes… I used that ALLLLL the time… I’d love to have something similar to that in PiwiGo.

          I’d actually throw a few bucks to someone to do it if they were so inclined.

          Serguei Dosyukov · Sep 3, 2014 at 09:40

          link to module would probably help as not everyone familiar with G3 repo

          Chris · Sep 3, 2014 at 09:44

          I seem to be having issues replying further down the tree in your blog…

          Serguei:

          http://piwigo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=153907#p153907

          http://codex.galleryproject.org/Gallery3:Modules:embedlinks

          Serguei Dosyukov · Sep 3, 2014 at 20:02

          All comments are moderated, so they do not appear immediately in the list, sorry

        flop25 · Sep 2, 2014 at 22:57

        Thx Muug We start to know quite right your opinion…
        To answer you, you can use symlink! And any cms save in one folder since you can always browse the tree to find that common album. For Piwigo it’s in sub-albums in /galleries or in sub sub albums in /uploads

        plg · Sep 3, 2014 at 00:20

        Hi Muug, I replied on http://piwigo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=153894#p153894

        To sum up, I say that it’s a technical design decision. Not a stupid one. Maybe not the one you would have taken. Maybe we have a wider experience on problems that occurs on various hostings and file systems. In my opinion nearly nobody cares about this design choice because they focus on user features instead.

        If that’s so much annoying for you, you can open Piwigo code, modify it and send a patch with an option to decide how files should be stored. That’s the power of opensource 🙂

OC2PS · Aug 27, 2014 at 04:12

In any migration, one big issue is automatic generation of URL redirects (possibly a block of 301s for .htaccess). How did you achieve that?

Drew · Sep 15, 2014 at 14:21

I like the look and user friendliness of smugmug, but it’s a pay-site! I’m willing to pay for the ease of it – except for the lack of a gallery3 > smugmug migration tool. Anyone seen anything like that in their travels? I only found some gallery2 tools…

    flop25 · Sep 16, 2014 at 10:54

    Hi
    if you are talking about Piwigo, it’s free in both sens; you surely saw piwigo.com which is an hosting service using Piwigo (like wordpress.com)
    Check out piwigo.org

      Serguei Dosyukov · Sep 16, 2014 at 13:43

      I think Drew was referring to G3 > smugmug migration tool. I personally not aware of one to exist.

      flop25 · Sep 16, 2014 at 13:45

      completely misunderstood the comment :p Sry

Tim Chuma · Oct 25, 2014 at 05:55

I have been using Gallery 3 since early 2011 and have 26,867 photos across 512 photo galleries. I know using an unsupported product would eventually mean my site would be more vulnerable to security exploits but I am loath to have to do such a large migration as I work as a website migrator and have been avoiding having to do it for my own sites.

    Mervyn Groves · Oct 25, 2014 at 10:53

    I used Gallery 2/3 since 2008 and while I have nowhere near the volumes you mentioned, my gallery is 9000+ images in 350 albums, migration was easier than I expected. Best bite the bullet early and get it over with!!

andy · Oct 27, 2014 at 05:03

Used Gallery for 8 years and hoping it will be continued but looks less likely every month. I will wait till the end of 2014 then probably move on for security reasons. I have tested a lot of free open source galleries over the years but Gallery 2 and 3 were the best.

Nothing is ever certain with these projects and it was a big shock to see Gallery close down. I asked the original developer about Zen Photo Gallery having users and the reply back then was “no chance” its a single user gallery. Look at it now! Its had a lot of development from its early days. It was sleek and minimal then though.

Don’t know a lot about Piwigo but that and Zen seem the best at the moment. Maybe some of the open source portals have decent addon galleries (Drupal, Joomla, WordPress)

Gallery 3 is hibernated. Migration to Piwigo… | chup.info · Aug 11, 2014 at 23:02

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