ZenPhoto Added

Many times I will sit down at the computer and think of a program I need. “Boy, I need a program that does this, and this, and this …” I’ll say to myself. And then the hunt begins. I’ve been looking for a better photo album to add to the site for a while now, and taking a bunch of Easter and OEGE pictures this weekend spurred me into searching for one again last night.

Why am I looking for a better photo gallery for the site? Because I use Picasa, which forces me to output static HTML pages for my photo galleries. The advantage is, the pages load really quickly. The disadvantage is, you can’t edit an album without changing it locally and then reuploading the entire thing. I love the way it manages my photos on my computer; I don’t love the way it creates web albums.

It’s always easy to find programs that meet some of your needs, but often it’s tough to find one that meets all of them. End users are often forced to do one of two things: compromise their original needs, or try and modify the program to meet their needs. I’ve done both before.

A third option is to write your own solution of course, but that never seems to work out for me. I mean, it does on small projects — for things like a script or a small program, it’s often simpler and quicker to write your own than to spend forever searching for someone else’s solution — but for bigger projects, things like forum software or photo galleries, it’s a lot simpler to take someone else’s established project and, if possible, adapt it to your own needs.

A couple of weeks ago I found a comparison of photo gallery software on Wikipedia. I’m positive that’s not an all inclusive list, but it gave me some place to start, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve been checking them out, one by one. As I expected many of them were close to what I was looking for, but none of them were perfect.

I should have started in reverse alphabetical order — I found my solution in ZenPhoto. It runs on my own web server, so I don’t have to worry about other people owning my stuff, or any sort of storage quota. It works off a directory structure, meaning if you put folders within folders in the gallery directory on your computer, that’s the way they show up on the web. It’s very clean, supports plug-ins, integrates with WordPress … basically, it’s exactly what I was looking for.

It’s also killing my web server. I imported about 10 directories this morning and my poor server’s CPU has been sitting at 100% usage for half an hour now. (This really makes me appreciate the power behind some of those online image sites.) My web server is a 2.4Ghz machine with half a gig of RAM, so I’m sure I’ll be scrounging around through machines at home tonight for some more memory to slap into the box to see if that makes a difference. On top of that, I forgot about my weekly scheduled virus scan, which kicked off right as I was copying the files over to their new home. Remind me to reschedule that …

I hate to even post the link with as slowly as it’s running, but for those of you curious (and who don’t mind waiting for load times) … here’s a slow and small preview.