I am satisfied with the process of my migration to Gallery2. Most of the things work already. Here is a brief round-up:
- All images and albums are imported, sorted, and thumbnailed.
- Few albums are tagged for easier searching.
- Old style of URLs is configured and working. All old links should be fine now.
- I have familiarized myself with Gallery2 internals a bit. Maybe even more than I intended to.
There are still few things that remain to be done. I have to polish and fine tune the installation. I have to integrate the gallery with WordPress. And I still have to enable comments. It would also be nice to see some sidebars somewhere with random, most popular, and recent images.
While imoprting my old albums I ran across a few issues. Firstly, I’ve got the feeling that the whole database design is somewhat fragile. I was breaking it easily. Luckily every time I managed to get back on track. But few times I was almost pulling my hair out of my head.
Secondly, I found Gallery2 to be very limiting at batch processing of existing albums. So limiting in fact that I ended up writing a Perl script – fix_g2.pl. This script fixed the database to reflect album names and creation dates that could be easily extracted from the names of image folders on disk. It also fixed permissions on the folders where I keep original unprocessed images. As usual, the script is very specific to my setup and my needs, but looking at its source can give you an idea or two. Use it at your own risk.
Resume: the photo albums section will still be updated and tuned a lot in the nearest future, but you can start using it again already. If something doesn’t work – don’t be too mad. Drop me a line though just to make sure that I know that something is broken.