Gaze upon this

I’m pleased to report that the gallery is functional again. Well, it technically has been functioning, but it is now functioning in a manner that I am very pleased with. The short story is that, thanks to the excellent plugins kPicasa Gallery and Shadowbox JS, my blog now displays my public Picasa web albums. And, I just have to add, it’s pretty slick.

The story of Assortments Today and photo galleries is a long one. I’ve had so many successes, failures, set backs, and bumps along the way that I’ve decided to commit this history to writing. So, if you have nothing more important to do at the moment and are just dying to read a mini primer on photo album web applications, by all means, click on! It’s a long read, so you might want to settle in. Hope you find it riveting.

I installed the first publishing platform on this website–which I guess, officially turned it into a blog–back in 2004 (for history’s sake, the platform was Movabletype; I’ve since updated to the far superior WordPress). I have to say, this made things much much easier than using notepad to update my website – Dennis, remember those days? After I discovered how incredibly convenient, easy, and customizable the new platform was, I wondered if there was something similar available for my photo galleries, which I had always manually constructed. (Seriously, think about what that entails: resizing the picture, creating a thumbnail, creating a caption, putting it onto an html page, and keeping it updated. I did that religiously for several years. No kidding).

Gallery

I quickly discovered a wonderful program called Gallery (which is now technically named Gallery 1–it has been “replaced” by a Gallery 2–but I’ll refer to it as just Gallery for now). Gallery is an open source PHP-based photo publishing and management application. Basically, all I had to do was copy over the Gallery program files to my webserver, go through the configuration process, upload photos to my webserver, and voila: Gallery would automatically put them into albums and generate the web pages. People could scroll through the albums, leave comments, the whole shebang. It was awesome!

Of course, soon the perfectionist in me started to rear its ugly head. While it was nice to have all the web pages generated dynamically, it was annoying that Gallery look was completely different from the rest of my blog. It has some basic themes that you could download and tinker with, but they didn’t really change the fact that my gallery looked like a completely different site, which bothered me. So, I started to experiment. I started editing the PHP ever so slightly, and hanging around the Gallery customization forums to figure out how to integrate it into my blog. Eventually, I succeeded! When you clicked on the gallery link, you’d be presented with a fully integrated album, all nice and pretty. I was so pleased with myself. I happily used this version of Gallery for quite some time.

Of course, problems arose when I decided I to migrate over to WordPress.

After Movabletype’s horrible horrible comment spam and complicated interface made it impractical for me to continue using, I decided to migrate my blog to a new publishing platform – WordPress (which I use to this day and am very satisfied with). After an easy migration over to WordPress, I quickly discovered that, since I had specifically and painstakingly edited the PHP in Gallery to conform to an existing design, when I launched up my gallery on my new WordPress platform, I was presented with the same, old fashioned blog design that I had been using and recently abandoned. Obviously, this was a problem. What was I supposed to do? Did I have to reedit the Gallery pages to conform to the new design? Well, it was a pain in the butt before, and I frankly didn’t want want to go through the process again, especially since WordPress allows you to download and update dynamically different themes for your blog, so it really wouldn’t make sense to go through the process of customizing Gallery to a new theme.

Thus, a new search began to once again solve my photo album problems.

Gallery 2

I headed back to Gallery’s website to see if something could be done. I saw that Gallery had gone through some incremental updates since I last installed it, so that was one option. However, the real kicker was that I discovered that the braintrust behind Gallery had released a new verison – Gallery 2. Compared to Gallery 2, Gallery 1 was kid gloves wrapped in pulled punches. It had a completely updated, modernized backend, added database support, support for a slew of third-party modules (e.g. captcha, image manipulation, and much, much more) and just more updates and improvements than I can really even begin to account for here. The choice was clear: I had to update to Gallery 2.

Downloading and installing Gallery 2 on my webserver was simple enough, but I had more than my share of problems migrating my Gallery 1 albums to Gallery 2. In fact, if you run some creative searches on this blog, you can find some of my postings relating to this topic (like, here, for example). I know I was experiencing this problem for quite a while, but I don’t actually recall how I solved it. Think it had something to do with increasing the local cache on my webserver… or something like that. But I solved it eventually! And then I had the brand spanking new and shiny Gallery 2 installed on my blog.

Gallery 2 was really great. It was fast, sleak, and just oh so cool. Everything was so customizable, I could tweak to my heart’s content. This is why I was (up until recently) so wedded to Gallery. I hadn’t really jumped on the third-party photo sharing bandwagon, I wanted my photos on my blog and that was that. Besides, I found Gallery 2 to be equal if not superior to the third-party websites, and I had far more control. So, why bother with the rest? Another thing that made Gallery 2 so cool was when I discovered Gallery Remote, a neat little javascript program that you could run on your computer that would connect to your website and upload photos. You could resize, add captions offline, then upload when you were ready. It was so awesome.

WPG2

Of course, sooner or later, the upgrade bug has to bite, right? In this case, the ugprade bug was telling me that it was time to take steps to integrate Gallery 2 into my WordPress blog — just as I had done with Gallery 1 back when I was using Movabletype–but that this time I had to do it right. Surely there had to be a plugin or other mechanism to get Gallery 2 and WordPress to talk to eachother, right? Enter WPG2, a WordPress plugin that embeds Gallery 2 within WordPress. Exactly what I was looking for. Seemed like a dream come true, and for the most part it was.

By and large, WPG2 worked very well for me. What was a little tricky however, was getting galleries to display properly in your WordPress theme. Although WPG2 came with a special theme that was supposed to make Gallery 2 embed properly with most any WordPress themes, I never really worked very well out of box for me. It usually took a fair amount of tweaking (either PHP or, in most cases, stylesheets) to get the gallery to display properly. This usually involved creating special stylesheets and header and/or footers specifically for WPG2. Sometimes, if you were lucky, a WordPress theme’s author would be kind enough to put together a version of particular theme that was “optimized” for WPG2. I found one such theme and used that for quite some time. Still, I never really understood what exactly made these themes optimized for WPG2. Needless to say, switching themes turned out to be a hassle most of the time, and I found myself lurking around WPG2′s customization forums on more than one occassion. And you know, sometimes even that got confusing at times – I wasn’t clear if I should be asking for help on WPG2′s forums or Gallery 2′s forums. Eventually, I think they sort of integrated and now direct all people to one place, but… there was definitely some confusion there for a time. These are all really just nitpicks though. 9 out of 10 times, with enough tweaking, I could get my galleries to display properly. And I was really happy with WPG2 and Gallery 2.

Problems develop… again

For all the benefits to WPG2, Gallery 2, and Gallery remote, there was unfortunately one big drawback. Eventually, it got to the point where there were just way too many pieces of this puzzle to keep updated. Here’s what I’m talking about. There were times when, after the Gallery 2 folks released an update and I went through process of updating that on my webserver, I’d find that the new version wouldn’t work with WPG2. Great. There was even one point where, after a fairly long dry spell of updating on my part, I discovered that both Gallery 2 and WPG2 had gone through significant updates – in the case of WPG2, the updates were so significant that I basically had to learn how to use it all over again from the ground up. That’s annoying. Plus, I don’t necessarily recall every single itty bitty customization I’ve made to my particular setup – most or all of which got erased when I updated to the new versions of Gallery 2 and WPG2, so it was frustrating trying to remember what changes I had made and trying to figure out how to implement them again.

And of course, on top of everything I’ve already described, WordPress was being updated as well! I recall there was at least one time where I updated to a new version of WordPress which just caused the most massive headache of broken Gallery plugins of all time for me. I think the second most recent massive WordPress update I completed last December created a wasteland of broken albums and plugins, and I had to reinstall a crap load of Gallery stuff. Frankly, I never did get it to work quite the same way again. How frustrating is that? So, basically, I was constantly dealing with several moving targets, trying to keep everything up to date and working properly. If you can imagine what it would be like to ice skate on a moving platform while juggling with one hand and writing an essay with the other, all while reciting the alphabet backwards, you’d sort of maybe have a sense for all the crap those WordPress, Gallery 2, and WPG2 updates sort of put me through.

And then to TOP IT ALL OFF… my webserver went and updated PHP and MySQL. So, I was painfully reminded that there was actually a FOURTH massive item to keep track of in the ongoing drama of keeping everything up to date and functioning correctly. To 1and1′s credit, the massive backend update actually did not cause any problems with WordPress… but it did break WPG2. Figures. At this point, I’d had it.

I should mention here that I still think Gallery is great and WPG2 is an awesome, awesome plugin. I’d been addicted to Gallery 2 for something like 4 years and frankly, I’d probably still use it, if it just weren’t so difficult to grease all its moving parts. So, as a result of WPG2 breaking again, I put the brakes on my obsessive efforts to get my gallery working. I went ahead and linked to a non-embedded version of the Gallery, but I gave up on trying to get WPG2 to work properly.

So, with Gallery unfortunately no longer really meeting my needs, I decided to explore other online photo album solutions.

Hello… Picasa

Picasa, as I’m sure most of us know, is Google’s free photo organizing software. I’d been using Picasa to organize my photos offline for quite a while. In and around June 2006, Google entered the digital photo sharing space with Picasa Web Albums, and it has since become my photo sharing site of choice. It also happens to integrate seamlessly with Picasa, and, as of Picasa 3.0, it is easier than ever to keep your offline and online photo albums synced up. Creating a photo album on Picasa Web Albums is a ridiculouly simple process. You just select the pictures, album, or collection you want to upload, and click on “upload.” Select a few options (size of the photos, where you want it to be stored, where it will be public or private, etc.), the photos upload, and you’re done. Even with all of Gallery’s ease of use options, I found Picasa to really be a breath of fresh air. Of course, doing things like adding captions, reorganizing or resizing the photos, and other common customizations is easy as pie. Picasa Web Albums even supports videos (i.e., it will convert your videos into flash) so, now you can even easily share videos online. Gallery actually supports video as well, but I never really had the strenght to walk down that path. In any event, Picasa is a very versatile, easy to use photo sharing site, and I highly recommend it.

Having decided I was very happy with PIcasa web albums, all I needed to top it off was a means to integrate my Picasa albums into my blog. Thanks to WordPress’s enormous customization community, I quickly discovered kPicasa, which is just a fantastic program that embeds your Picasa web album into WordPress. Top it off with a little Shadowbox JS, and my gallery once again rocks.

Conclusion!

Well, I can say with all sorts of certainty and conviction that this qualifies hands down as my longest post ever, probably in the entire history of this website. You can probably tell I started to get a little bored with it towards the end, but I’m only human. Hope you enjoyed reading this. If you did, you may be as big a geek as I am.