I have a lot of pictures on file somewhere. In roughly 50% of the cases, the picture is not on a disk that is stashed somewhere inaccessible and anyway likely to have failed.
A very few of them are online on my album site. That site, incidentally, runs Gallery2, which is a very powerful and versatile piece of software. It’s also tricky to manage, ridicolously overpowered and overgadgeted, the themes I’ve looked at all stink (honestly, (1) table layouts for galleries is just wrong, and (2) when using css flow, like you should, can’t you do it right? Y’know, like making it look good?) and the WordPress integration plugin looks horrible.
WordPress 2.5 is going to have galleries, but they’ll be linked to posts, which won’t cut it for me, so I’ll still need some external gallery thingy.
ZenPhoto looks promising. It’s simple, it offers clean, if not perfect, themes (narrow columns: good for text. Ungood in galleries.), the integration plugin works and looks good in posts, and even better integration with WordPress is promised in a future release. It has a nice and simple filesystem interface (upload a directory of images, and they’ll appear automatically). There’s no process for exporting from Gallery2, though, which is a downer. That job is gonna suck.
I have a lot of recent pictures. I have stories I want to tell, and I want to illustrate them. Which means I need to solve this problem somehow to calm my inner geek beast.
(You may or may not have noticed a lot of theme changes in the blog recently. It’s part of this process: Find a theme that’s nice and simple and integrates well with whatever.)
I could say “fuck it” and switch to PicasaWeb and Blogger. It would be simple. It would be easy. It would be restrictive. It wouldn’t be hacky. Hacky good. We likes to code, yes we does.
