Friday, 16 December 2005, 12:52:55 EST

I really don't like Gallery. I used the first version a long time ago but got frustrated with it and wrote my own. Since they finished the second version, and I haven't had a chance to rewrite mine, I decided to give it another shot. It was working fine, and I even had a plugin for iPhoto that allowed me to upload photos from iPhoto directly to my photo gallery. Then it stopped working. I tried to upload my Thanksgiving photos the day after Thanksgiving and the exporter would stop uploading after the first picture and give an error that it uploaded zero pictures. If I went to the website, I could see the album I created with the exporter, browse to it, and see the first photo; repeated for every vain attempt I made at uploading the pictures. Sure, maybe it is a problem with the exporter and not the gallery software. That doesn't change the fact that Gallery sucks. It is a pain to keep maintained (the authors evidently don't know how to write decent code) and the administration interface is confusing. I would really like to be able to post pictures in a browseable manner but it looks like I will have to write the code myself. I have done some minimal searching and come across a couple other packages but none that strike me; Zenphoto came close but it is still too early in development. If I am going to use half baked software I might as well use my own. Maybe I will take a day during my break and hack something up. I doubt it though. I know how that would break down. I would get the presentation part of the program done and have a hackish administration side that "works" and leave it at that. You really don't want to see how I post to this site. It isn't pretty and was never meant to last as long as it has. I don't really want another one like it.

Basically, the point of this post is this: If someone ever says to you, "Just use Gallery! It rocks!," punch them in the teeth.

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