How to pull traffic into gallery?

[Penguin Pete]

I'm new to Coppermine, having quit the hosted blog world to start my own site. I picked Coppermine after some shopping around, and feel I've made a good choice. Only trouble is, it seems nobody else looks at it!

My mission in life is, I design desktop-wallpaper sized images using only free/open source software design tools; everything from Gimp and Inkscape to POVray and Blender, everything from abstracts patterns to full photo-realistic scenes. I want to offer these free to the public for download under the Creative Commons attribution license (which terms are basically: "use how you want, but credit me with a link back to my site"). So my needs are very different from a personal photo-sharing site. Generally, any time a Linux user or developer wants free wallpaper graphics and Googles for them, they should be able to find my site.

When I hosted these on a blog, they were getting from 300-500 hits per day! Now, I see about 50/month. It seems that Coppermine doesn't seem to be very spider-friendly. Also, a blog pings trackback services to notify people of freshly-posted content. Here, I put up new pictures and then listen to the crickets chirp.

So, four areas of inquiry: (1) Much as I *like* Coppermine and as cool as it looks, is it really the ideal tool for this job? Can anybody point/link me at other artists who use coppermine to display their work online? (2) *How* to give each picture it's own page, as far as a search engine is concerned, so that when people Google for "desktop wallpaper magnetic acrobats" they find this, this, and this ?
And finally (3) RSS/Atom feed capability would be nice. For instance, I'd like to be able to plug a module into my home page so that instead of just the link, visitors could at least see a preview of my #N-latest pictures? Something that automatically updates with each new post, just like the main home page of the gallery does, using an RSS-like method.

And finally, (4) is my design/layout scaring people off? Did I goof something in the controls, so that something is inexcessible? This is more aesthetic advice than the other technical ones.

Any advice or comments or ideas are appreciated.

PS I know I should be promoting via links, etc. I've been doing that.

[Tranz]

I am guessing that your gallery has a different domain name from the hosted blog. If so, you simply can't compare two sites of different ages and names like that. It's like comparing apples to apple seeds. The blog will have more links credited to it. If you no longer use the blog, you can do a 301 redirect to the gallery URL so that you get credit for those links, and basically let people and bots know that your site has moved.

If Coppermine weren't spider-friendly, Google wouldn't have indexed thousands of urls from my gallery. However, if you want to help it along, you can try using the search-engine-friendly plugin. It doesn't work on all server setups, so use at your own risk.

[Joachim Müller]

@Penguin Pete: you're using cpg1.4.2, upgrade asap. Please respect the "One issue per thread" policy in the future. Moving accordingly.

[Penguin Pete]

OK, GauGau, sorry about the one-topic thing.

" you're using cpg1.4.2, upgrade asap."

- is this just because of the "relocate_server.php" file mentioned in the news thread? I'm searching all over for it and don't see it. If I find that file and remove it, does that negate the urgency? Like, I could put it off until I'm done with some other projects?

[Tranz]

No, it's not because of that file. http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=28445.0