I’ve been trying to figure out for quite a while what the best photo gallery is. Started with Picasa and some of the other ones, but they don’t allow original photos to be uploaded and have size limits. Last year, found “fotki.com”:http://fotki.com which is $30 per year and allows unlimited storage and also has password protection for each album as well as storage of the original photos and also 9 cent per photo printing. The main issue is that it makes you create each directory on the web interface and then you upload with either picturesync or by ftp to “ftp.fotki.com”:http://ftp.fotki.com.

So, it works, but it is a pain. Now that I’m trying “bluehost.com”:http://bluehost.com which has a 1.5TB limit, integrating all this with wordpress would be great. Here is what I tried:

# PHP Gallery. I actually used this program a long time ago with the original MovableType site, but stopped because I only had 500MB of storage and ran out. Also the interface was super clumsy. Tried it on bluehost and it is better, but it has all sorts of issues with uploads. You are supposed to be able to just FTP an entire directory structure up and it automatically thumbnails, but that never worked.
# Nextgen Gallery. This is a cool minimalist program with really great viewers that ties directly into WordPress. It also allows you to FTP up a directory set, but the main problem is lack of password protection. This is a real problem for privacy reasons. So I’d use if it weren’t kids and things.
# “Zenphoto”:http://zenphoto.org. Trying this one now. It has password protection. From bluehost, it can directly used as simplescript, so installation and updating are automatic. It also seems to allow you to FTP up just about anything and it creates the albums for you which is wonderful, wonderful. That’s what I really want, copy up a photo directory set (I’ve got 30GB of photos now) and then have it make it look pretty in the web interface. Net step is to try the WordPress plugin to see how that integrates. You literally just FTP your whole directory into /zenphoto/albums and you are set. Wow!

There are a collection of “plugins”:http://www.zenphoto.org/2008/01/wordpress-plugins/ which include a widget to let you most of which don’t seem to work. The only really useful one I’ve found is “Zenphotopress”:http://simbul.bzaar.net/zenphotopress/ which lets you add photos easily to blog entries. The other ones like Zenpress and the various widgets don’t seem to work with the latest WordPress 2.5 and ZenPress 1.5

I’m Rich & Co.

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