Other free gallery applications

[z0rglub]

Hi everybody, users and dev team :-)

I'm the creator of another Web Gallery system (PhpWebGallery) which is far less famous than Coppermine. I'd like to share your experiences and to know if you (dev team) would agree to share your point of view on this topic :  http://forum.phpwebgallery.net/index.php?act=ST&f=5&t=1311

The goal of this topic is to help users to choose the Image gallery systems which suits the best their needs.

Hope this topic will be welcomed here :-)

[Joachim Müller]

as coppermine is a free application (open source) we don't have to make profit (same as you), so there's no need to think in categories like "jealousy" or "competition". I therefor find you posting very welcome and appreciate you mentioning coppermine. We had a similar idea in mind, with a page that'd list other gallery software and have a feature comparison list. This would make it easier for users to decide which gallery software to choose.

Tarique (coppermine dev team) has posted a thread on this, requesting users to write such feature comparison review.
Who'd be more qualified than you to write a comparison between Coppermine and PhpWebGallery than you? Your contribution and initiative would be more than welcome.

I'll do a review on your gallery in return...

GauGau

[z0rglub]

Who'd be more qualified than you to write a comparison between Coppermine and PhpWebGallery than you? Your contribution and initiative would be more than welcome.

Great Idea   I'll soon install Coppermine (which release is the most representative ? the last release candidate ?) And see what differences I found, the good things, and what lacks (in my opinion, maybe there is nothing !)

[Joachim Müller]

I'd go for the most recent (cpg1.2.0RC2 ath the moment). Thanks

GauGau

[z0rglub]

OK... I've tried to test Coppermine 1.2 (Release Candidate) as best as I could (but it is evident that I've first tried to find the features presents in PhpWebGallery...). I think the best way I can give my opinion is having 2 distincts paragraphs : goods things   and... less good things

I. Good things

• Installation steps were clear, perfectly understandable (OK, I'm far from being a novice user).
• The configuration part is very "full of possiblities" (developer comment : I really like the way configuration parameters are stored in the config table, this is the good way I think... I'll change the way I do for next release of PpWebGallery)
   
• Default template is very beautiful
• User mode / Admin Mode : the idea to fully integrate the admin mode in the "normal" mode is a good thing
• Rating system (PhpWebGallery has no rating system)
• Even if I can't see generation time of pages, I got the feeling that it's faster than PhpWebGallery pages (the worst "improvement" of release 1.3)
• Very good integration of graphical libraries (I was happy to use ImageMagik) -> I've found the generated thumbnails so good (ratio filesize/quality) that I'll take your parameters for my shell scripts :-)
[/list:u]

I. Less Good things

• Users passwords are stored in clear (I place this in first and really, I don't like that)
• System of categories/albums completely separated from physical directories is... hard to understand and very confusing ! Why not making simple : a directory is a category (category = album)
• Pictures are viewable in only one album (I mean : I can't link a picture to more than 1 album)
• We are forced to use the web server to generate thumbnails.
• Javascript everywhere. It is maybe a good things for minor features, but I haven't been able* to rename albums (I did it directly in the database...)
• No advanced parameter for user profile (language, number of picture to display per page...)
[/list:u]

I hope my "review" stays objective enough. To conclude, I would say that Coppermine is more oriented for "community" web gallery (special user category, I think the application was developed this way), while PhpWebGallery is really oriented for a single managed gallery (possibility to let visitors upload pictures, but not really well done for this)

* note : I use GNU/Linux and my web browser is Mozilla Firebird 0.6

[Tarique Sani]

Thanks for your time and words ...

About your less good point
1) The storage of passwords in clear text - I would go against the popular belief amongst the developers that clear text passwords == insecure

Think of the major points where your security can be breached and those points will not be protected by mySQL encryption at all - what we really need is client side MD5 encryption of the passwords - that said incorporating passwd encryption into CPG is trivial

2) Storing pictures in a single directory - well the end user and admin should never be required to look into that ever this point has been discussed often in this forum

Points 3,4,5,6 raise some very valid questions indeed and some of those are already being addressed