Gallery Opinions Please

[Alpha_7]

Hi All,

I've been slowly working my way through my PPing of my Fiji shots, and I have dilemma. I was using gallery software called Web Gallery to build a temp gallery to allow people we met overseas access to non pp'ed shots. I have also been given access to different gallery software that seems much more powerful but more confusing / complex to operate.

I'd really like some honest feedback on galleries I currently have and which each person prefers, I have my own list of Pro's and Con's but I'd rather keep them to myself until I've heard some other opinions.

Gallery 1 has had more work done to it thus far and can be found here.
http://www.fiji.coffeeloungegallery.com/

Gallery 2 is the newer one so had less done with it so far
http://fijiphotos.coffeeloungegallery.com/

I guess the third option would be that both galleries suck and I should look for another alternative, but it's the less attractive option as far as I see it.

[sheepie]

Love the first one mate - really nice presentation, although a little slow to load (here at work anyway).

[greencardigan]

The first one looks better by far. Just need a little bit more work.

I use gallery2 for my gallery. You should try out some different themes.
Is that one of the standard themes you're using?

[wendellt]

problem with 1 is the flash slows irt down soem people don't have that much patience

i prefer the 2nd one if you can slimline it down that way your caterign for thelowest common denominator of user

in particular i like this image, it's one of your best
http://fijiphotos.coffeeloungegallery.com/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=67&g2_serialNumber=2

[MATT]

I would asay the 1st one was great.

Wasnt slow at all on my 512k dsl connection.

Setout was nice and I found it easy to navigate and looked good.

No.2 seemed outdated ... Like something I would do!!


My 2 cents

MATT

[johnd]

Craig, I preferred the first gallery by far.
It didn't take too long to load for me either.
Cheers
John

[shutterbug]

First one...so simple and easy

[Geoff]

Craig - first one for me too, the layout, the style is all that much better

[Manta]

First one Craig. No question.

[makario]

First one for me as well...

[PiroStitch]

no pun intended but first one is flashier

[ABG]

Another vote for the first one from me too Craig. It's much simpler to navigate.

[blacknstormy]

First one Craig - I use web wizard pro for our business photograph gallery - easy to use, easy to navigate, and doesn't look too bad
Maybe if you broke up some of the galleries, it will speed up the loading time, but I didn't find it too slow (but I'm used to it)

Nice photos btw
Rel

[Frankenstein]

First gallery is more attractive and loading time was no problem (1.5mb ADSL). But the size of the images was only about half my screen size - is this because of my high screen resolution (1280 x 1024) or because that's the size the software makes it?
Gallery 2 is OK but a bit vanilla.

I use a freeware app called Porta - http://www.stegmann.dk/mikkel/porta/ - for my gallery. Maybe a bit basic but I like the final result.

Frank

[Alpha_7]

Thanks for the feedback Frankenstein, the gallery makes ths photos that small for general viewing (I'd prefer them to be bigger as well), you can click the enlarge button but who wants to do that all the time.


Thanks everyone else for the feedback (There is about 370mb's worth of images on there so that may have something to do with the load time (that and a few of the folders have heaps of files in it)

[macka]

The first gallery is definitely more polished. I use gallery2, and it's not user friendly (unless of course you know PHP), but it does have a big advantage in that it's database driven, and it can get much larger before the software craps itself. Provided your web server can handle it, gallery2 is supposed to take 100k images before it really starts to chug, whereas non-database galleries will just slow down the more files you upload.

[moz]

I'm with the whining about photo sizes - I'm running 1200x1600 and I kept clicking the thumbnails hoping they'd get bigger... the second one seemed less organised, it took more clicks to get to the final thumbnail. But that's mostly coz there's little in it right now, so single photo on the first page seems odd. The flash one doesn't do it for me, sorry.

I'd be interested in search of metadata facilities, because that's what will kill you later. Looking for "those Fiji photos" in 5 years time when you've added another 50k shots to the gallery is no fun.

I'm trying to work out how to get Gallery2 to make size selection persist between pages, coz if it'll do that I think it'll suit me fine.