The 2.2 release is planned for this month- which means most of the core architecture for importing 1.x galleries will be in place. That means file information is now stored in the database and we’ve added a new File module that allows you to display the information independent of channels using frontend tags (a la gallery tags).
The actual import of gallery entries won’t happen this release. We’ve got two significant additions that need to happen first: First, the comment module needs to be abstracted so we can easily add comments to whatever we want to- because we’ll need to import and allow commenting on files in order to import gallery comments. And we don’t want those comments to be so separated from channel comments like they are in the 1.x gallery. Second, we’ve got some conceptual issues (and then code issues) to work out with regard to how to handle subfolders. This is particularly important to the gallery import given that galleries could have subfolders created for categories. (Gallery relationships also need some thought.)
It’s planned that the 2.3 release will see us able to actually import the 1.x galleries and provide all existing gallery functionality. And hopefully 2.2 will give us some feedback on how we can add significantly to what we had in 1.x.
I know it’s taking a while, but we want to get this one right. Rather than a separate module that didn’t always get a lot of attention, file handling is going to be core to EE. That’s taking us more time, but should pay off in the end.
Hope that clarifies things a bit!