The trouble with gallery apps…
So I’ve been looking for a nice, easy solution to the photo storage/sharing problem people like my mother face. Over a year ago when I started evaluating this stuff, the best I could really come up with was the open source PHP script MG2. It’s a really beautiful piece of software, requires no db or special extensions, and works like a charm — most of the time. It has a few quirks, like blowing up when a photo with the same name is uploaded, as well as very poor batch upload functionality. It’s been months since a version’s been released and it doesn’t look like it’s really under active development anymore.
I’m not enamored with any of the photo sharing services, a la flickr, zoomr and particularly Picasa Web Albums. I’d prefer to have the option to upload these photos at full res, and the upload caps are pretty low considering how cheap storage space is (and how lucrative ‘print-on-demand’ promises to be). I understand there are some other unlimited free services (Kodak), but…well, screw Kodak!
So in my experimentation with Vox, I decided to have my hand at uploading a couple of recent Halloween photos to see how it handles it. I like the 10 meg max per photo, but that’s about all I liked. For starters, it crops each photo into a square in the thumbnail, which is fine from a UI perspective, but even after drilling down on it, it gave me no indication that it took the full photo — it still showed up as a square. So being the dumbass that I am, I went and manually cropped each pic in Photoshop and then upload them again, not that big of a deal for me as a designer, and I’m too lazy to go back to the uncropped shots anyway. I’m thinking that the average user would be almost as confused and disturbed as anybody who saw my costume…
Well, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but it’s still inconvenient. I do like how Vox gives you most of the relevant attributes to edit upon upload (including “may be offensive”, which was the first thing I marked for these shots!), but they managed to forget the most important attribute — title. It defaults to the file name and you have to go back in and edit each photo to fix it. With everything else so easy to change inline, I find this UI choice pretty strange.
All of this nitpicking aside, I understand Vox isn’t a gallery application — it was just an easy target for some of my gripes with these apps. It looks like I’m still sticking with my current gallery for now — if you want to see it in action, and check out a few more disturbing pics from Halloween, I have them uploaded here. I’m still on the lookout for anything that can help my mom dump photos right out of Picasa and onto the web, titles, tags and all (anything but Picassa Web Albums, and preferably open source), so drop me a comment if you have any ideas.
Update: Turns out WordPress has elegant photo handling as well, without all the kludge of Vox. I’m still looking for that one killer gallery app though…