I’ve been neglecting my picture gallery lately. And when I finally found the time to upload a great, long overdue gym picture (I’m sure you’ll like it even if you don’t go to the gym ^^), I also took the time to have a look at the administration panel, particularly at the update section. And I quickly noticed the latest Gallery news, “Gallery is going into hibernation“, which sadly means the project is abandoned. Not much of a surprise, since development had been really slow, and Gallery 3, although it still seemed to me like the best choice, never really felt finish.
Gallery is GPL, which means that anyone with skill and time could take over, but it’s not enough to make sure a project continues, particularly when there are quite many alternatives – and even if those aren’t as good. Wikipedia has a list of photo gallery software, which seems quite exhaustive, except maybe it misses Zenphoto, which is kind of an intermediate between a gallery and a whole CMS.
After a brief overview of this list, and of the comments on the Gallery closure announcement, it seems to me that the best alternatives would be either Coppermine Gallery or Piwigo. What I like about Coppermine is that it keeps it simple and doesn’t overuse JavaScript. But the design feels really quite old, and hard to browse (notably, there doesn’t seem to be proper support for tags). So I’ll probably go for Piwigo. I read somewhere that they recently created a migration plugin to convert a Gallery 3 gallery into Piwigo, so when the time comes hopefully it won’t be too hard to migrate.
Final note: here’s a demo gallery using Coppermine, and one using Piwigo.
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