Alright, so to try and get myself motivated to get more of my images back on a gallery I thought I would check out the latest offerings from Menatlo Gallery. Gallery3 has been in the pipelines for quite some time and there was a significant focus shift in the way the software was to be used, in a nutshell and looking in hindsight I think that was primarily to reduce the complexity of teh software and move towards a simple clean interface which concentrated more on easy quick photo management.

I was dubious at the start, however Gallery1 and Gallery2 were a bit painful in managing images, moving things around and other little quirks made me neglect my gallery.

A couple of issues came to mind when thinking about upgrading;

1) I had a nicely modified theme which I liked the look of this would not work with gallery3

2) How would the import process go? with 5k images this could be a breaking point.

3) I wanted to move the address from somewhere deep in the server to a nice easy possie like /gallery with a subdomain of gallery.avernus.com.au this could throw a spanner in the works.

4) I had a multi gallery site to confuse issues as well!

Anyway, installed the latest release of Gallery3 which was first non beta version, talk about great timing huh! The install was very easy and i put it in the new location with teh new domain name. The whole interface and software reminds me very much of wordpress, it now has a dashboard and a sidebar with ‘widgets’ i guess you could call them that! And has modules, which were there before in gallery2.

So first thing was first get the module called ‘gallery2 import’  thats a good place to start, ran that baby for quite a few hours and it imported all albums and images flawlessly, took a while but it did it! It also left the old gallery2 install in place – great if it all went pear shaped.

Themes were always gonna be an issue, there is only a few themes out there, I realised I was gonna have to tweak them to get what I want – check the next entry for details about this.

Getting Sharp Images from Gallery3

and

Customising Gallery3

In terms of modules – I have steadily added to the module collection and I think I am pretty close to what I want now;

Akismet    –     Filter comments through the Akismet web service to detect and eliminate spam (http://akismet.com). You’ll need a WordPress.com API key to use it.
Shopping Basket     –     Provides a simple shopping basket and checkout with paypal integration
Carousel     –     Add a vertical carousel for recent & popular items in the sidebar.
Comments    –     Allows users and guests to leave comments on photos and albums.
Digibug   –      Digibug Photo Printing Module
Exif Data     –     Extract Exif data and display it on photo pages.

Favourites     –     Allows users and guests to create favourite lists and then e-mail them to people.
Gallery2 Import     –     Import your Gallery 2 content into Gallery 3
Gallery 3     –     Gallery core application
Image Block         Display a random image in the sidebar
Info     –     Display extra information about photos and albums
Iptc Data     –     Extract Iptc data and display it on photo pages.
Menu Links     –     Add links to the menu and rename the home link.
Module Updates     –   Compares your installed module version against the ones stored in the GitHub.
Notification    –     Send notifications to users when changes are made to watched albums.
Organize     –     Organize your gallery by apply tags or moving images
Photowidget     –     Add a moving flash sphere of recent, current & popular items in the sidebar.
HTML Purifier     –     Enable XSS protection using HTMLPurifier
reCAPTCHA   –     reCAPTCHA displays a graphical verification that protects the input form from abuse from ‘bots,’ or automated programs usually written to generate spam (http://recaptcha.net).
REST API Module     –     A REST-based API that allows desktop clients and other apps to interact with Gallery 3
RSS     –     Provides RSS feeds
Search     –    Allows users to search their Gallery
Server Add     –    Allows authorized users to load images directly from your web server
Slideshow     –     Allows users to view a slideshow of photos
Tags     –    Allows users to tag photos and albums
Tag Cloud     –     3D tag cloud
Users and Groups     –     Gallery 3 user and group management
Watermarks    –     Allows users to watermark their photos