There is no doubt that there are a ton of photo gallery scripts out there. When looking for software, it’s easy to fall into the “ooh’s and ah’s” trap. Being mesmerized with features and easily losing track of the original goal or intended use of the gallery. There are gallery applications that literally are their own website – like a Photo Content Management System. Others truly warrant merit and further research because of their usefulness & hopefully their adaptability for multiple applications – as well as – their ability to stand on their own as needed.
Here are my picks for the most versatile PHP gallery scripts. You may be surprised at the findings here as my values are different than the average person who wants to share their pictures. My value is based more-so on the flexibility and adaptability of a gallery script rather than being locked out from customizing it. Gallery scripts are a good asset if you want to show items in a pre-established website/web application and do not want to have to write from scratch. Reusing this code can help deliver an application expediently, but being able to have it resemble the host site is critical – it must be flexible if it is going to be used as “part of another website”.
Server Test Environment: These were tested these on Ubuntu Server (LAMP install) – latest version. Approach to install: Every click and drool wizard feature was attempted – no manual configurations were attempted to ensure the ‘as advertised’ feature would be accurate.
Flexible and adaptable come at a price. Sometimes the only method to add a photo is to ftp it up to the folder (that’s raw/flexible), but it is considered flexible because a script can be written for exisisting application to control how/where a photo is uploaded. So while reading these, keep this in mind. So look for “stand-alone” if having an upload mechnism is a must for you.
You’ll find that most gallery scripts will boast of these features – comments will be limited to the most noticable of these features for each source in this post:
Features:
- On-the-fly Thumbnail/Low resolution picture generation
- Unlimited Categories and Sub-categories (it uses directories)
- Integrated fast text database mode (MySQL also supported if prefered)
- Users comments
- Rating system
- Web/FTP picture upload
- Top Rated/Last Commented/Last added pictures pages
- Slideshow mode
- User level support to protect pictures/directories from unwanted people
- EXIF/IPTC metadata support (hot!) (Only found in phpGraphy)
- Multilingual support (See TranslatorPage for complete list and status)
- Web interface management
- Lossless jpeg rotation support (via exiftran/jpegtran)
- Video, sound and text files support
- Layout/Text very easy to change
- Highly configurable (Themes/Templates)
- Installation Wizard
phpGraphy
http://www.phpgraphy.org/demo/index.php
phpGraphy did everything it boasted of, and was a snap to setup. This will be one that will be kept around to help the next person that asks for a “quick gallery” install. It’s lightweight, easy to modify (theme/css) – logic was easy to follow, and painless (which is a key feature).
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Plogger
Looks great, hard to integrate into an exisisting site, and install was less than bulletproof, but it worked after the 2nd try. Theme’s were not easy, but for a stand-alone, it’s useful.
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Simple Picture Gallery Manager
http://spgm.sourceforge.net/spgm/index.php?
As most do, it generates it own thumbnails and has a stripped down – very modern look. Makes this script easy to include into another project if a sub-folder install will work for your circumstance. Ironically, it’s more full-featured than it appears to be (looking at the demo had me believing that this was going to be a very light script). Even has a few themes made specifically for the application available through the SPGM website making it intended to be a stand-alone gallery script.
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Qdig
http://qdig.sourceforge.net/qdig/qdig-demo2/index-Dark.php
It’s a one-pager script, but it’s quite details for being one page. I’m always leary when a script says, “it will adapt to any server environment, but some settings…. http://qdig.sourceforge.net/Qdig/AboutQdig (details of setup). In my case, setup was a breeze, and it shows well – easily themed, and the flash-like thumbnailing across the bottom made it appear to be more of an application. Regardless, it worked well as promised.
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bolGallery
With some hesitation this was added, but there are just times you need this. If you need something that you can just put a pile of jpeg’s into a folder, and send someone a link – this is the ticket…. There are many times where this is the perfect tool. Want to show someone 340 proofs that you have to individually upload? (No one does!) . Integration was quite easy, but I probably wouldn’t use this as an end user application, but the concept is great for the times you just need to show someone images quickly.
The quantity of findings were unending while searching for opensource gallery scripts. Going through all of these gallery scripts will take time, and the task will be split up into parts. These 5, that I felt were worth mentioning, were the result of going through 50 scripts. Please comment on any other projects you would like to suggest. Part 2 will be coming in the near future.