Thread

I’m thinking of re-tooling an existing Gallery installation and moving it to EE, but as EE Core doesn’t include the photo gallery, I can’t demo it and I’m wary of buying EE Personal before seeing how the galleries work (or is there a way to demo this?).

I want to get rid of Gallery for a few reasons, mostly related to bloat: It’s slow and I only use a fraction of its features. I’m also considering switching to a photoblog type thing, where I can post about a set of photos and then link to a gallery on the same site. I don’t care about things like comments on photos, public/private permissions, videos, or .zip file downloads.

I’ve got a little under 3,000 photos in my current gallery, organized with blog-style URLs like /2007/06/portland/. Going to /2007/06/ will list the galleries from June 2007, and going to /2007/ will likewise show you the galleries from the year. The month and year organization is my doing; I’m creating these parent and child galleries as I upload the photos, it’s not something Gallery is automatically doing the way a blogging app would. My current galleries can be seen at gallery.synaesthetic.org if my description isn’t clear. What kind of navigation would EE give me for something like this?

Would EE be a good fit for something like this? I realize that EE isn’t a photo gallery app but since most gallery apps rather suck I’m trying to expand my options a bit. I’ve dabbled with Code Igniter a little and I’ve heard lots of good things about EE, so I’d like to give it a try if it will serve my needs. If anyone is doing something similar, I’d love to see your sites to see how it works.

Greetings—

You can try the gallery by using the hosted demo linked here.

As to the rest - there is a lot of discussion on these forums about using the weblog vs using the actual gallery to manage photos. It depends on your needs.  The weblog will give you more flexibility in display and archives but no batch processing.  Many that use the weblog use it in conjunction with phpThumb.

But if you think as a weblog in EE as a “data container” - you can see how managing photos would be quite good with that. It will take a bit of template work to realize your goals, but either module can ultimately work for your needs.  I would try the hosted demo of the gallery, play the weblog module and possibly phpThumb and read some of the posts in the how-to forum about using the weblog as a gallery, then decide from there.

I realize that my answer is somewhat vague - but there is so much flexibility in ExpressionEngine that multiple ways can achieve a similar goal.  There’s nothing like digging in and seeing how this works to figure out if EE is the right software for the project.

You might also browse our showcase to see some of the great variety that can be achieved. =)