I’ve been using Gallery Project for my photo galleries for quite some time now, so a few months ago when I heard they were going to stop active development, I was very sadden to hear the news. More importantly, security wise this obviously became a huge concern for me. This meant I had to start looking into alternatives.

I first delved into MediaGoblin. Knowing that MediaGoblin is a Free Software sponsored project, eg; they’re pumping money into its development. MediaGoblin is proabably not going anywhere anytime soon. The install process is fairly straight forward (Python app running under Apache via FastCGI), their site has really good documentation on getting MediaGoblin up and running. After spending an hour or two with MediaGoblin, it seem like it was a bit overkill for a simple online photo gallery that I wanted to setup.

My second Gallery Project replacement consideration was WordPress with the NextGen Gallery plugin. NextGen Gallery is the defacto WordPress photo gallery plugin, so it’s definetely not going anywhere anytime soon. Given both WordPress and NextGen Gallery simplicity, I’ve opted to adopt it as my Gallery Project replacement. The photo import process was really easy, I simply just had to copy my old images into to the new NextGen gallery directory, and click on the “Scan Folder for new images” submit button and NextGen was able to successfully add my images to my new gallery. The only problem with this approach was that I had to manually update the image names, a tags. Given that my old gallery was just 500 images, I was able to manually make the changes in just a few minutes, however if someone have had a gallery with thousands of images; I can see this becoming a problem. The only problem I encounter when migrating to WordPress w/ NextGen, is that the default tag based pagination url structure is broken. This appears to be a known issue from what I see. https://wordpress.org/support/topic/pagination-does-not-work-on-the-page-images-tagged

For example.
Tag home page:
http://www.alpha01.org/ngg_tag/las-vegas/

With the default pagination settings enabled, the secondary page would redirect to the following (page returned an empty page):
http://www.alpha01.org/nggallery/page/2

The correct url the default NextGen tag based pagination should be return is:
http://www.alpha01.org/ngg_tag/las-vegas/nggallery/page/2

I mitigated this bug by simply disabling pagination all together. After that, my switch was seamless. Interestingly, now my photo gallery www.alpha01.org is fully responsive now. However since it’s heavy JavaScript based, SEO is practically gone, additionally getting image specific tracking analytics gets a bit complicated to implement. I’m still researching for a good solution to this problem, since it would be nice to see what images are getting the more hits.