Gallery plugin for FreeNAS

[Robert Smith]

Sure, if you're publishing an album for others to view. But, that still leaves the full archive of all the originals and even slogging once through those to find the few relevant ones worth sharing is painful enough through a file system. Far better to have a good gallery that supports thousands and lets you quickly create smaller albums for sharing.

Maybe for people who shoot JPEGs only and never edit them...

My originals are RAW files, I keep originals, and there are several outputs - TIFFs for printing, JPEGs of various sizes depending on how they are shared, etc. So, for me personally albums is a part of the puzzle, not the end-to-end solution.

jAlbum is what I have been using for online galleries that I keep on my own website. There is a ton of tools like jAlbum, pick your favorite.

Adobe Bridge is what I use to manage pictures in bulk; but I do not really recommend it; there has got to be something better by now, I just have not had time to research it.

 

[fracai]

Maybe for people who shoot JPEGs only and never edit them...

That's me. And, I suspect, most people.

So even though the album is part of the puzzle for you, what do you use to review the images to decide which are worth printing or shared in an album? I'm looking for something that can hold the entire archive. Having support for generating additional public albums is just a nice bonus.

 

[Robert Smith]

I use Adobe Bridge, to, among other things, review, tag, and batch process pictures. But I am ready to find something new for two reasons:

• First. Adobe went different picture management direction with Lightroom. Now with Bridge and Lightroom they have a split personality problem, some things can be done only in Bridge, others only in Lightroom, lots of features overlap; it is a mess if you ask me.
  
• And second. I am not elated about the new subscription-only model.

 

[riste]

I'm running Piwigo and Lychee is on the list for a replacement.
Piwigo works, but it's kind of a pain. Adding new photos requires a manual scan and with many images that takes a long time will likely time out before it completes. You can speed things up by first just scanning for new folders and then scan each folder individually, but that's a pain on it's own.

Plex is adequate for browsing images, but not that great if you're looking to find images for sharing or uploading elsewhere. I've also had issues where the scanner crashes while importing photos and then fails to display thumbnails. I've solved this by writing a script that scans individual folders, but that shouldn't be necessary.

Lychee looks promising as it doesn't require a database and just presents your photos as they exist on disk; generating and caching thumbnails as required. The install should be really simple as well.

Overall it's a little surprising how empty this category is. Most galleries are targeted at artists looking to present their portfolios, not home users looking to browse thousands of images.

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ZenPhoto looks like another good option.
http://blog.terminal.com/hosting-you-own-pictures/
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/installation-and-upgrading/

Zenphoto works well. No problems. Still in testing. Cant decide Lychee or zenphoto!

 

[adrianwi]

I'll have a look at zenphoto then. I set-up and imported about 500 pictures into Lychee, but when I mark some as public and then logout it doesn't show any of the public photos.

 

[riste]

I'll have a look at zenphoto then. I set-up and imported about 500 pictures into Lychee, but when I mark some as public and then logout it doesn't show any of the public photos.

Got the same issue... have u found a solution?

 

[adrianwi]

Nope! Zenphoto doesn't appear to have this issue, although it's overly complicated and doesn't look as nice as Lychee.

To be honest, neither really do what I'd want from this type of solution though, so I'll just stick with sharing stuff through Plex :D

 

[adrianwi]

Got the same issue... have u found a solution?

I had another play with Lychee and realised you need to share the album as well as the shots within the album. When you are in the Album, click the small eye symbol in the top-right menu bar and you can set the share settings.

Zenphoto has the advantage that you can point it to a mount point and it will scan all the images to create a library, which you can then micro manage what to publish externally. The interface is a little clunky and it doesn't look great, either when administering or viewing as a guest.

Lychee looks much better, but you have to load each set of images manually, which for me would take far too long. Configuring what is shared to not is also pretty manually.

Still think Plex is a better option for sharing with family and friends :D