I’ll be redirecting gallery.iwaruna.com to zenphoto.iwaruna.com in the next day or three. If you have bookmarked pages in the former, you should recheck and update to their location on the new server. Subscription feed links have also changed; the main feed which grabs recent photos from all albums is now http://zenphoto.iwaruna.com/rss.php. I’ll also eventually add back the sidebar thumbnail here (prolly via Zenshow or ZENpressed).

Mostly for my reference, but here are some “in progress” or “needs fixing” issues with Zenphoto —i.e., when using version 1.1.3 with the Default theme. Some are already known by the Zenphoto developer community. Overall they are minor and don’t adversely affect my usage.

• Clicking an image shouldn’t always download it.
• XHTML and CSS validation errors. Former might be due to invalid markup in both theme and core files.
• Internationalization (and localization) support.
• Random thumbprint for albums.
• More ease in moving, renaming and copying images and albums.

Wikipedia has a photo gallery comparison article. However, it’s not comprehensive since it’s a stub which needs cleanup (e.g., lists only basic features, and doesn’t mention other projects like Phormer and Plogger). Wikipedia also has categories for free image galleries and free photo software, but again, they don’t quite have the information I seek. If you know of better comparison sites, please tell me about them. My search-fu hasn’t had much success. I’d like to read an actual article comparing features and requirements, or hear about your own experiences, rather than spend time sifting through forum threads.

Wishlist

I know there are free services out there, but I should describe what I want in a web-based photo gallery application. Moreover, because I don’t produce huge numbers of photos at a high frequency, I’m more interested in an online gallery rather than a photoblog. AFAIK the first two points below will eliminate choices like Flickr and Picasa. I’ve been impressed by what I’ve seen at SmugMug, but it’s not free.

(A numbered list, more for reference than priority.)

1. Can be hosted on my own domains at no additional (monetary) cost.
2. Ability to customize to my heart’s content. Not just open source (ideally), but also well organized markup and code. Ability to easily install, modify and remove plugins, if available.
3. Requirements for the client side must be browser and operating system independent.
4. Easy to install, backup and upgrade.
5. (X)HTML and CSS for included themes should validate out of the box. Duh.
6. Pretty URL structure (permalinks) for human readability and search engine optimization (SEO) should just happen. Fiddling around with URL rewrite settings should be kept to a bare minimum, as well as straightforward. It would be nice to be able to easily prevent (ideally control) hotlinking, too.
7. Reliable responsiveness: It doesn’t have to be lightening fast all the time. Just something that isn’t a memory hog, or has frequent server timeouts.
8. Can dynamically resize images and generate thumbnails. I.e., I want to upload only one version of each image.
9. Clear, concise UI for viewing (users). Choice of themes including simple, accessible designs. (I like minimalist, streamlined designs.)
10. Clear, concise UI for administration. Ease in modifying settings, adding, editing, deleting and rearranging images and albums.
11. Offer syndication (RSS).
12. Support for subalbums.
13. Provide search. Tagging and categories would be an optional perk.
14. Ability to control users and comments by default. For example, from my current gallery usage: To have a single user (me) and turn off comments.
15. Preferred implementation in PHP, with database support for MySQL.
16. WordPress (WP) integration: At the very least, allow a random thumbnail from the gallery in my WP site.
17. While I don’t allow comments or ratings, plugins to control comment spam and spambots, à la Akismet, Bad Behavior or Spam Karma would be nice to see (at least in the future).
18. (Optional perk) Easy support for moblogging.
19. Last but not least, clear, well organized documentation (often an ongoing project, understandably), and an active, responsive development community. Free support forums. News and version notifications through syndication.

A potential package I’ve played with is Zenphoto. Unfortunately, the current release 1.0.8.2 lacks a few critical features (10 partially, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, and 19 partially). According to the roadmap, most of these would be implemented by version 1.1, but search won’t be available until v2.0, which has no projected date (it’d be no earlier than Spring 2008). For a long time there have been only one or two developers working on Zenphoto, and recent inactivity made me worry that the project had come to a standstill. But after reading a couple of forum threads, the good news is that they’re reorganizing (with more developers), and are earnestly working towards releasing v1.1 in a couple of months.

Update (5 Nov 2007): Yowza, looks like the Zenphoto 1.1 release contains the features mentioned in the previous paragraph. A serious contender! Wonder how tricky it’ll be to migrate my Gallery 2 content…

Update (6 Aug 2008): Another encouraging reason to switch: Travis Wu created a Gallery 2 to Zenphoto migrator.

Rantingly

I’ve used Gallery 2 since last Summer and, I’m sad to say, have become more annoyed with it. Whenever I’ve updated my installations, the process kills my modified theme (overwritten by the unmodified version, which doesn’t even validate out of the box) and horks the .htaccess file. The URL Rewrite plugin is such a friggin’ pain; my Big Wish would be for pretty links (permalinks) to occur automagically. Honestly though, something like the near-effortless permalink setup in WordPress and Zenphoto would be perfectly reasonable and acceptable. Good thing I’ve got file backups.

(Manually and locally speaking, I’d need to set aside server configuration files like the .htaccess for both WordPress and Gallery. However, for my live sites my hosting service provides a quick one-click method for updates which somehow intelligently avoids touching such files for WordPress. But not for Gallery.)

Moreover, I am so tired of erratic, uninformative timeouts which occur with my gallery site. I have no desire to run a production site in debug mode for any extended period of time just to catch unpredictable errors. In addition, I’ve taken a few simple steps for performance optimization, even though there’s less than 1,000 images uploaded. Yet performance remains sluggish, whether viewing pages in a web browser or accessing feeds from a news reader.

Gallery does have a lot going for it. It’s amazingly rich and extensible, including the ability to block hotlinks, various print services (online photo labs) tools, image randomization, password protection, and so much more. While I’m unimpressed by the documentation, I’ve gotten fast and accurate help from the Gallery forums.

I know I said I don’t want a photoblog, but I do want a decent content management system (CMS), where the primary content happens to be images. I wish Gallery were more like WordPress when it comes to maintenance, especially with installation and upgrades. WordPress is such a dream in those respects! There, I said it. The “why can’t you be more like your sibling / coworker / other friends?” complaint.

The change that might make a difference to you, dear readers, is that this site now has an Atom 1.0 feed for all articles (http://iwaruna.com/feed/atom/), which you may use as an alternative to the usual RSS 2.0 feed (http://iwaruna.com/feed/).

Notes on this upgrade, mostly for my own reference:

A. For articles with zero comments, closed comments and closed trackbacks, the font for the “Comments Off” label (e.g., in the home page) appeared too small. In WP 2.2, that label appears within an “extra” span element without and class or id. This was due to a change in function comments_popup_link() in /wp-includes/comment-template.php, described in ticket 2180. I guess the gist of this was to allow styling when that label occurs. But since my theme doesn’t utilize it (i.e., the unnamed span), I added a CSS hack to both accommodate the code change and workaround the font size issue.

B. Updated the function smilies_init() in /wp-includes/functions.php (previously vars.php in WP 2.1) to refer to custom smilies. (For the curious: Borrowed from a freely available Adium emoticon set.) Also updated the folder containing the smiley image files.

C. Added the Atom 1.0 subscription link to the Subscribe section in the sidebar. I haven’t added Atom feeds for comments (seen in single post pages) and categories (seen in Archives). Need to poke around the Codex and WP forums to see how others have implemented those kinds of feeds.

D. Update the WordPress / Gallery 2 Integration plugin (WPG2) to the latest version, 2.12. Once again, I ran into the broken image issue, so had to re-modify my gallery’s .htaccess so that they’d display again. Seems to happen every time I upgrade WPG2, and Gallery’s fussy URL Rewrite plugin is to blame. Documenting my steps here, in case I encounter this again.

1. To begin with, I’ve already turned off hotlinks in Gallery, to prevent other sites from hotlinking to content there. This was done under Site Admin ⇒ URL Rewrite ⇒ Rules: Near the bottom of the page, select the checkboxes (turn on) for “Block hotlinked items” and “Send HTML for hotlinked items.” No URL pattern or keywords are needed for either setting.
2. Upgrade WPG2. Notice that images are broken. So I need to re-allow hotlinking specifically from this site.
3. Modify the .htaccess for the Gallery server. Fire up vim (or your editor of choice), and go to the section of this file called # BEGIN Url Rewrite section
4. Locate this line: RewriteCond %{HTTP:Referer} !^$
5. Right underneath this line, add this one: RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?mysite.dom [NC] where mysite.dom is the site you want to allow hotlinks from.
6. Repeat for other instances of line 4 in the specified section, which in my case occurred twice.

Unfortunately, MAMP has issues. First of all, there is no documentation or even a FAQ which addresses the simple question of how to update MAMP. After taking a hint from the MAMP forums, it turned out to be rather straightforward:

1. Stop the servers; I did this via the MAMP widget.
2. Backup /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/ —basically any web content that you have added or changed.
3. Backup /Applications/MAMP/db/ —your database(s). MySQL instructions: Actually, don’t backup the default /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/mysql/ or /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/test/ folders, which are usually updated. Only backup the other folders and files under /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/ which are specific to your installation.
4. Backup other folders you had added to /Applications/MAMP/, such as a Gallery 2 data folder.
5. Replace /Applications/MAMP/ with the newer version.
6. Replace the content and database folders with the ones you had saved in steps 2 through 4.
7. Uninstall the previous MAMP Dashboard widget, then install the newer version (which is located in /Applications/MAMP/). Apply any widget fixes (see below).
8. Restart the servers, again via the MAMP widget.

Ah, and the other problem: The “Open Start Page” in the MAMP widget doesn’t do anything. (The Start Page does open if I launch MAMP.app, oddly.) I found a helpful fix at gaarf.info, where you edit mampwidget.js (in the Mamp Control widget package contents) to correct a preference file reference. Using your favorite text editor, go to line 90:

var startPage = widget.system("/usr/bin/defaults read com.webEdition.MAMP
startPage",null).outputString.replace(/[\r\n]/,"");

Change com.webEdition.MAMP to com.living-e.MAMP. Start Dashboard, hit the Manage Widgets (+) button, remove the MAMP widget (tick its ‘x’ button), then re-add it from the Manage Widgets strip. Restart servers, and the Open Start Page button now works. Whew.

I hope the MAMP folks can fix these simple issues of documentation and the widget. It’s a shame their forums seem to be plagued with spam (at least the English ones), too, which makes finding answers a bit slow.

Update (6-Nov-2006): Thanks to Holger Meyer for answering my email about upgrading!

Update (22-Feb-2007): The latest 1.5-beta1 still has the Start Page bug with the Dashboard widget. Gallery 2 and some of the WordPress plugins no longer seem to work.

Update (8-May-2007): MAMP 1.6 came out, and still has the Start Page bug with the Dashboard widget. The download now includes both the free and Pro versions of MAMP. Gallery 2 stoutly refused to run (blank page issue), but the workaround was easy: In the php.ini configuration file, increase memory_limit from 8MB to 16MB. While Gallery will run when given 12MB, the WPG2 plugin won’t work (no random image in Sidebar), unless memory_limit is set to at least 16MB.

Update (17-July-2007): Was noodling around the MAMP website and noticed that version 1.6.1 was released on 11 April 2007. Likely a typo in the date, since the files have a timestamp of 15 May 2007. The widget bug seems to be fixed at least (enfin!). The packages listed on the releases page are the same between 1.6 and 1.6.1. It’s a shame, though, that MAMP hasn’t had a more recent, thorough update to include the latest Apache, MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin bits (compare with the newer packages in XAMPP for OS X, a less mature OS X server bundle). You’d think they’d do that to keep the paid MAMP Pro version up to date.