I broke this new gallery project down into three Steps:
- Selecting and installing gallery software;
- Selecting, organizing and uploading images from my photo archives; and
- Setting titles, tags, keywords and descriptions.
As of now I’ve completed Steps 1 & 2 and I’m beginning on Step 3.
After looking at a number of free gallery software packages I selected Piwigo. I’m not going into detail of the other packages I considered. Some were too large and cumbersome and some were lacking features I wanted. Piwigo seemed to best fit my needs.
Here’s features that were important to me along with a few of the minuses or concerns I’m finding with Piwigo.
Pros:
- PHP and MySql, no fancy Flash, Ajax, Java…the basics, runs on most platforms.
- Albums trees with no limit of depth — flexibility
- Good support for Tags
- Themes and Plugin Support
- Privacy settings — useful for securing personal, family or client albums.
- Comments and Ratings.
- Customization Options — still a work in progress on my part.
- A good user community — quick answers to questions.
- Adobe Lightroom Publishing API support – a “sweet” workflow.
Cons:
- Some concern about performance…may be a hosting issue not Piwigo…investigating.
- Customization has a bit of a learning curve…still learning.
- A little quirky at times.
In my new Meandering Passage Gallery all album groups, albums and photos have been created and “Published” via the Piwigo Adobe Lightroom Publishing Plugin and then pushed out to the gallery. No having to go to the gallery to make changes and updates — It’s a great workflow!
For the install I created the sub-domain “gallery.meanderingpasssage.com” through my host web controls and then copied the Piwigo files to the directory via FTP. I then created a database for Piwigo’s use along side my MySQL 5 WordPress database and ran the Piwigo install script. In less then a minute Piwigo was installed and ready to be accessed. It then became a matter of theme selection and customization to match the color pallet of the Meandering Passage Blog. Adding a few Piwigo plugin’s for extra features I was ready to start creating Albums and upload photos.
While Piwigo Gallery is free to use, the Piwigo Lightroom Export plugin does cost $15…but it’s worth it and more. It makes maintaining the gallery about as painless as possible and since I’ve already confessed I’m not good at keeping a gallery updated this is just the help I needed. :-)
As I stated above I’m starting Step 3, working on defining better titles, descriptions and tags for each photo. I’m also going to be a little more critical and perhaps eliminate a few photos that I selected on my first pass. I never expected to end up with over 700 photos in this gallery. However, over half, 400+, fall in the “Places-Travel” group. In this group I wanted to have photo which represented to me the whole journey or trip.
Perhaps 700+ photos selected on the first pass is not so bad considering the 30,000 photos I flipped through. Some may not make a second pass as I complete Step 3.
If interested ou can visit the new gallery via the Gallery tag above or simply clicking here.
To return to this blog you can click on the Meandering Passage Logo at the top left of the gallery or there’s a link in the Gallery drop down MENU.
If you see a photos that draw a reaction from you please feel free to give then a star rating and/or leave a comment. I’d also appreciate any feed-back on the function and impression of the gallery itself.
Hi Earl, I’ve enjoyed having a good look at your gallery, you have got some very good images. My favorite is “Bob on train” where you really captured a moment and an explanation of that moment in one frame. You certainly see a lot of colour wherever you go, a lot more than I do, and it makes your images very vibrant. Do you feel that a service like Zenfolio has advantages over Flickr for amateurs like ourselves? I don’t mean technical advantages such as you mention in your post, but advantages in terms of being a public display of your work.
Colin, yeah I became very “aware” of my attraction to vibrant color as I was selecting these…perhaps to the extreme in some cases. :-)
Zenfolio is great if you’re a “professional” photographer who regularly sells individual work or photographic jobs. It can take care of the sales order processing and the printing if you want it to and is very flexible in allow you to set it up the way you want to. As far as getting exposure for one’s work I’d say Flickr was better — more of a community. I tried Flickr, still have a Flickr account, but I never felt a connection to that whole environment. Just me.
Interesting information on this service I don’t know about.
Hi Don, It’s not really a service, Piwigo is photo gallery software you can load on you own host.
Like Colin, I had a present time browsing your new galleries. The presentation is very appealing and the content you choose is outstanding. It’s easy to navigate and the slideshow feature is very nice. I had toyed with the idea of opening a Zenfolio account at one time but never did register. I hope you keep us updated on your new venture with Piwigo.
Ken, I appreciate you taking time browsing my galleries and giving feedback on the functional experience. I’m glad to hear it went smoothy and was easy to navigate.
Yeah, Zenfolio is a good service but I didn’t need or use a fraction of what they offered so installing Piwigo as a no cost alternative fits me better. Plus the Lightroom plugin make it easy to keep the gallery up to date. Thanks again!
Hey Earl. I admire this undertaking. Redoing a photo gallery is not for those with a light stomach when they already have quite a few photos up. I know because I have often contemplated trying to get away from Coppermine that I have used for so long. It is even to the point where I have tweaked it so much, I don’t want to upgrade it anymore because I have to redo those tweaks every time. I also look at the massive amount of work it would involve to switch to something like Zenfolio. So for now, I just tell myself – it works, it looks how I want it – don’t mess with it. :-)
Piwigo looks interesting. I visited your gallery for a bit and it was nice to see a lot of images that I may have missed on the blog, or they weren’t in previous posts. Their use of navigation options when you mouse over different areas of the larger image is interesting. Does this work well say on a tablet where you have no “hover” reveal of the navigation? I saw that your title tags for your pages included a lot of HTML text – perhaps something to look at as you tweak further.
Functionally, it seemed easy enough to navigate around to the different areas. Performance was fast enough for me. I absolutely LOVE the Lightroom integration part – something I am drooling over. Good luck with the rest of the setup!!
Mark, thanks and you’re right it’s not an undertaking taken lightly — lots of hours and several times when I almost gave it up. I understand your reluctance in making changes or upgrades to your gallery and there is a strong argument that if it works why “fix it.” I didn’t have one that works.
Those navigational photo mouse-over area outlines only display in “Webkit” based browsers…Safari, Chrome. No sign of them in IE or Firefox. They also do strange things position wise when the screen become too small. On a tablet you don’t get the hover help but tapping on the area still provides navigation.
It’s usable on an iPad but I’ve seen some sizing issues with the large images…yet the slideshows seem to work very well on an iPad.
The quirkiness I spoke of under Cons! :-)
That Lightroom Publishing intergration makes it all worth while. I’ve done nothing with photos and albums directly on the site…it’s all been pushed out from Lightroom.
Hi Earl,
I visited your new gallery – great shots amidst a nice clean environment. Pretty impressive I think. Incidentally, from an end-user point of view, the performance was more satisfactory. Again, nice work (really like your “Painting In Fall” image).
John, thanks. The Gallery is still a work in progress but it coming along. Glad to hear the performance was ok…thank for the feedback.
I like how this set up works and, of course, it is wonderful seeing so many of your outstanding photographs organized into easy-to-scan collections. You certainly have done an impressive job with your project. Congratulations.
Anita, it’s been a long time coming and is still in it’s infancy, but at least there’s some of my photos out there and not lost in my off-line archives or the pages of this blog. Now it comes down to fine tuning the gallery until I’m satisfied…hummm, that may take a while. :-)
Thanks for the great info.
I am just in the early stages of creating a photogallery but have used WordPress for some time, inserting photos on a mostly singular basis. Recently I’ve purchased a domain name, had it hosted separately, and have begun a WordPress blog on that site. I’m still not sure how it’s all going to look in the end, whether to use Piwigo (assuming that’s the gallery I’ll use) as a standalone or integrate it with WordPress. Do you have comments on that?
I do love that Lightroom can be used to administer any photos, I’m just learning more and more of that software as well. It was one of my first purchases after I got my new camera.
I do like you site as well, the photo of you with your grandbaby (girl?) brings a warmth to my heart. We are new grandparents and I can empathize with your expression.
Take care,
Dwayne
Thanks for finally writing about > Selecting and setting up
a Piwigo Photo Gallery | Meandering Passage < Liked it!
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kitty
Excellent post. I’m facing many of these issues as well..