27 Feb, 2009 in
Blogging . Tags:
cooliris; gallery2; photos;
Fili's world
Culture & Travel – China, Hong Kong and Taiwan
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The number one complaint I got about the photo gallery for this blog is how bad it looks and how slow it is to browse between photos, compared to other hosted services like Flickr and Picasa Web. I’ve been using the very useful Gallery2 open-source PHP platform for years now and it can really do alot of neat stuff, but I’ve been way too lazy to dive in to spice it up a bit.
Gallery2 recently released their 2.3 version which, among other things, included a real boost to their slideshow option with something called Cooliris. This takes image browsing to a whole new level with 3D. Here’s a short demo on how I tested it out after the gallery upgrade.
I also took this opportunity to move the Fili’s World photo gallery to its own down – www.filigallery.com , long overdue. To the geeks among you I’ll just point out that to keep incoming links and blog embedded photos running this move involved some 301 redirects and blog DB string search-replace. With a few other tweaks, the general gallery experience should be a lot nice now.
Test out the slideshow feature (install the plugin for real 3D experience) and let me know what you think.
cfimages | March 6th, 2009 at 12:09 pm #
It looks good with the Cooliris feature. I use Cooliris a lot when browsing Flickr and it makes a difference.
I used to use Gallery2 for my site but I couldn’t get it too look right – more due to my lack of coding skills than anything else. I tried Coppermine as well, but now just do the whole thing through WordPress – it saves me a lot of time and hassles.
Fili | March 6th, 2009 at 12:41 pm #
cfimages – I completely understand. I mainly use gallery2 for some of the important features I couldn’t get back then in WordPress (batch uploading, easy batch management, theme tweaks and slideshow view).
Can you say a few words about what plugins, if any, you use in your WordPress gallery?
cfimages | March 6th, 2009 at 12:46 pm #
I use the NextGEN gallery for WP. It handles everything I need it to, with a couple of batch options. Individual pics in posts are usually served from Flickr however, and I enhance that with Shutter Reloaded, which is a Lightbox type java plugin. I could serve them all from NextGEN which has the Shutter Reloaded included in it – I’m not actually sure why I use Flickr with my site.
Fili | March 11th, 2009 at 1:30 pm #
Thanks CF, that’s good info.
IMHO – Flickr is a great service for “lame users” or community social web, but I prefer having full control over my images without having to pay someone to manage my stuff.
cfimages | March 11th, 2009 at 1:36 pm #
I see what you mean about Flickr. It’s great for the social side of things and makes an excellent image dump for large numbers of images. I’m actually going to go through the Gallery on my site and update in the next few days – I put it together very quickly when I redesigned the site and I don’t think it really represents my strongest work.