A little over a year ago I started using Gallery2 on my website to host photos. A few months after the initial adoption I discovered that Gallery2 is most definitely NOT cut out for any serious integration with WordPress. Or at least not with the WPG2 plugin and not while hosted on a standard account with DreamHost. Since the spring I have been working off and on to convert all of the posts using Gallery2 over to the built-in WordPress image management system. This evening I finally finished. I now am free of Gallery2. Forever!
Resource Hogs, Gallery2-zilla, Transitions, My Thesis
Since switching over to Dreamhost a week or two ago, I’ve been working on transferring over all of the static content that I maintained in parallel to my WordPress installation at my old webhost. Finally after much futzing about, I transferred over the first two real pages of photographic content. Behold, minimal content from the very first few days of my time in Tuinsia! There are literally only two of the very first pages completely transferred. It takes significant effort to coroberate between what I have on my old site, what I am putting onto this site, and Gallery2’s structure.
Speaking of Gallery2, it can be a real resource hog. I guess that’s partially my own fault though. Rather than only upload the images that I plan to use in the sizes I want, I uploaded ALL of the original images. At last check, I was pushing close to 11,000 images. Just the battle to get everything uploaded and imported into Gallery2 took a week. And I haven’t even organized but a few galleries worth of photos. The biggest problem comes from the image manipulation packages that Gallery2 uses. They eat resources for breakfast. Trying to resize all of the original massive images to thumbnails of various proportions, several different resized viewable images, and the like on top of watermarking everything can really bog the server down and ocassionally makes it barf out full-size images for no apparent reason. This is especially problematic on the left column of my WordPress theme (Tarski) where I end up with the odd MASSIVE IMAGE OF DOOM. It appears though that the ooccurance of these images might be largely limited to when I am logged in as an administrator to the site. Otherwise, I believe it just returns a blank image box.
A slightly less big problem is trying to perform any operation on the Gallery2 database, which runs through a MySQL backend, that accesses more than a few records. It seems that I must be on a heavily loaded database server with Dreamhost, or Dreamhost has a draconian policy toward MySQL queries and the number of records that can be accessed at any one time, or Gallery2 is particularly resource intensive when working with very large numbers of images. Whatever the case, it makes dealing with the entire image set a bit difficult.
If only there were a way to perform tasks such as creating resized images and thumbnails, optimizing the database, and other maintianence tasks on my own machine rather than on the server… That way I could actually get them to complete correctly AND not drain the resources on my shared hosting plan.
In other news, my masters thesis is slowly coming together. There are so many sources that I am still trying to digest! I read through a 300ish page textbook yesterday evening and skimmed the majority of the important sources. Each new book or paper I encounter holds a roughly 25% chance of being something quite valuable that demands a day or two of attention. While processing all of these sources, I am also trying to write bits and pieces of the acutal thesis. Hopefully in another few days, I’ll be able to start writing in ernest. First though, I have to clear two 1000+ page tomes and about 40 articles related to those monsterous works.
Gallery2 hiccups, barfs, and then recovers
I had a few hiccups today with uploading photos to my Gallery2 installation. Documentation of what happened is on the Gallery2 forums. There still are some annoyances that I run into while using Gallery2. For instance:
- Not being able to batch rotate photos based on EXIF data after they are uploaded and inserted into an album. Seriously. That shouldn’t be so hard to implement!
- Not being able to add more than about 50 photos at a time without the program barfing (this might be a Dreamhost limitation but really should be addressed in the Gallery2 core since I imagine many people use a similar shared hosting setup).
- Not having support for AVI movies in FireFox. To play them, people using FireFox either have to wade through support FAQ’s for Gallery2 to find some obscure FireFox plugin (that didn’t work for me, by the way), or they have to edit something in their quicktime plugin installs, or just use Internet Explorer. That is not a very good solution if you ask me.
- To be able to watch a movie, the permissions on it must be set to “view all” for the Everyone group. I like to keep my original-sized images to myself and want to just be able to set all of the permissions for all of the albums once.
- Watermark issues! It seems that my albums like to have their watermarks vanish periodically. This is a bit troubling as I want to be able to protect all of my content at least to the extent where people might awknowledge the source of the photos. I think this might be due to Dreamhost issues with regards to php_memory limits.
All in all, it’s very powerful software. I just wish they’d change and/or fix these few things.