Living Open Source

Very soon after discovering WordPress, I wanted to have some way of publishing all those random photos I take with my digital camera. When I started to look into this I discovered that there are many people looking for a similar solution. There are many people writing gallery scripts and WP plugins. But I’m yet to find one that fits the bill exactly. So here are my findings so far:

The Contenders:

• Gallery 2 & the WPG2 Plugin - Gallery 2 is the latest version of a popular and very sophisticated open source photo management tool. It works very well and the new WordPress plugin WPG2 also has some nice features. But I’m afraid it takes up a lot of space and is just overkill. If you want loads of features then it is probably your best choice. If you just want some simple albums in WordPress then read on…
• Coppermine - This is a tool that almost equals Gallery 2, but again suffers from the overkill problem for most WP needs. There is a plugin that allows you to pull pictures in your WP posts.
• Falbum - This is brilliant! Instead of hosting the photos on your own site, you can use Flickr, now operated by Yahoo! Falbum is a WP plugin that lets you inetgrated all your flickr albums into WordPress. It does it very well and you can even show some random photos in your sidebar. The disadvantage is that the free Flickr accounts only give you three photo sets. But paying a few dollars each year might be a smart move for this one.
• Lazyest Gallery - This is written specifically for WordPress as a plugin. All options are configured in WP Admin and it simply creates album views from directories and subdirectories you specify. No need to create albums - they appear based on the directory structure. Very simple, works very well.
• Plogger - This is a very simple and well presented album script. You can integrate it into WP, though it requires some editing of theme files. The big problem with this at present is that integration is made more difficult because plogger needs to run in its own directory. However, I liked this tool so much I have knocked up my own plugin to display random pictures in the sidebar on this site. Someone was working on the directory issue and a WP plugin. When these arrive, nothing will beat it!!
• Others - The thing is there a hundreds of options in this area. I’ve tried ZenPhoto, AutoGallery and others. Some I couldn’t get wokring in WP2, others just didn’t look right. You find a list of others here.

My Current Choice

Well, after trying all these and many others, I’m currently using Plogger. Not because it does everything I wanted, but because it looks neat and is simple. WP integration is not good yet, but it will improve, even if it means relying on my homegrown plugin.

Actually Plogger and Wordpress integration is now great with my own Ploggerpress plugin.