What's the best private photo/image gallery?

Forum-integrated or not. Of course integrated is definitely a plus. My forums are vB.

The best private gallery we've come up with, and it is integrated with vB, is Photopost. But this "best" does not include these functions that are essential to a rational display -

- user able to put photos and even albums in a particular order - in an album the user can't group photos by category or arrange them chronologically, so for example a trip has photos utterly out of sequence -
suggestion to make a separate album for each photo group is frankly idiotic, a trip with 70 photos might end up broken into a dozen albums and the photos in each one are still not in logical order

- manual slideshow - the user advances the image when they are ready - each advance returns the screen display to the top and the slideshow is below the screen display

- able to upload multiple photos in one trip to the hard drive, using cursor selection of multiple upload images at a time, not a separate upload button for every photo

- Photopost has an awkward, sometimes-difficult, sometimes-hard-to-understand administration. It's not completely terrible, one does learn some basic steps. It's not intuitive for non-techy types and hard to get volunteers confident they can use it.

Just the start of my complaints ... The gallery sw's attitude to these complaints often comes across as "so?" So I'm ready to dump any of these sw's I happen to be using for one that gets the functionality better. Yes I'm sure the design and coding will be 'hard.' Life is hard. Yes I would absolutely pay more for the above functionality, well-executed.

It seems all the galleries my staff and I have looked at are so clunky there are no winners in this sw category. To the point of puzzling ... it seems the designers either don't use them much themselves, use them only in a limited way, or they just don't care as long as they are selling licenses. Don't know which, little evidence they are trying to improve my list.

And fwiw vB's own included Album is IMO not user-ready. I tried it for my forum, hoping to replace Photopost with Album. To my frustration and extra expense I had to turn it off and go back to Photopost.

Online public sites such as Webshots and Snapfish have worked on these features, I guess realizing that the first to get it right would get all the business. If there is little to no hope a private gallery sw will match the usability of the public online sites, I might explore the options to link into one of those. Haven't figured out how/if this would work.

I am keen to find a better-quality private gallery as a forum add-on. Thoughts from anyone using a gallery with their forum?

 

Am I missing something? Can you not use the VB built-in system?

 

Yes, you did miss my reasons above. vB mentioned specifically,and everything on the list.

 

I think everything you listed is great, but I don't know of any solution that does what you want. I only have experience with Photoplog (Pro) and I love it, but it doesn't do all of what you mentioned.

I don't think what you want exists.

 

I looked for many of the same features myself, ease of use by members being the most important to me. I bought a few different ones to try and found nothing suitable. Ended up with Photo Post as most people are at least used to it.

I do have a gripe that so much of the software available for vB has no try before you buy capability, has shoddy or arrogant support and when you try to get a refund even after proving you have removed it they laugh all the way to the bank.

 

I recommend either gallery 2 or coppermine.

There is one gallery that I really liked, but its off line right now. RSGallery2

The last I heard, RSgallery only works with joomla - which is a real shame. But the rsgallery project is worth checking into. Maybe they ported it so it can be used outside joomla.

 

Sad you are not using SMF. SMG would be the perfect solution for you. It is for me XD.

 

I would recommend checking out Gallery2. It's extremely flexible, has all the features you mentioned above (easy to understand admin interface, ability to upload multiple photos at once, ability to manually choose the order of things, manual slideshow, etc.), and is completely free. In addition, it has an extensive permissions system that will let you control exactly who can do what where.

 

Thanks very much for the tips, will follow up on these.

I hope y'all are right about the features of Gallery 2. If what I want isn't out there, might I suggest to code developers that if you invent one I will buy it, if I can afford it. If the demo proves out that will be a 30 second decision. Remember to include a way for me to migrate my Photopost content to date.

 

Gallery 2 is a full featured gallery, open source. It also has some other features, video, comments, etc.

Coppermine, I have no experience, but is a good competitor.

I use G2 embedded in Drupal.

G2 itself has an active support team, but the developers are working hard for G3. It has a beta out already, its completely revamped and now anticipated release date.

I will say that G2 is so full featured, that you have lots of configuration to work out. From my experience, w/o the embedding, it does need some technical backend knowledge. But like I said, the Support forums are not too bad.

 

I use several different photo programs on my site, i found that photopost had way to many issues and my website was hacked via a security breech via photopost gallery.

1) Photoplog Pro, it is almost like photopost, but i found it to be a little more user friendly and quite a bit easier to customize to my website.

2)Coppermine Photo Gallery which is really a great program and can be customized as well, it is a bit tough to work with in my humble opinion.

3rd) C&D Garage, this is a photo upload program that is built specifically to site that are based around automotive enthusiasts. (I find this one to be really neat).

 

Was it the current version of Photopost that got you hacked? I'm curious because I was just about to install in on a new forum that I'm creating.

I've never had a problem with vBGallery, but I want the additional features of Photopost Pro.

On topic, I don't remember the plugins that I used for my Drupal site's gallery, but I do know that in IE the lightbox (Lightbox 2 I think) images don't update properly when you edit your images.