Best gallery plugin for photographers?

You may want to consider a separate photo gallery (like ZenPhoto, Gallery or CopperMine) that allows for WP integration.

Thanks Ipstenu!

That looks more like it! I knew there had to be something like that. ??

Plogger could be an option as well. Found it with the other names.

Interesting evaluation here.

ZenPhotoPress plugin
PloggerPress plugin

Have you looked at Flickr and associated plugins? There are a LOT of Flickr plugins. In fact, there’s one called “Flickr Gallery” that might do it for you. Just a possible alternative to what you’ve already looked at.

Also, I’d love to know what you choose and why, when you do make your final decision.

FWIW, if you’re a professional, there are advantages to putting your work on YOUR domain vs Flickr and those sorts of things.

A word of caution about Gallery 2 … It’s going away, and Gallery 3 drove me to Zenphoto (which met all my needs). I upload a folder of 400 images about once a month (subfolders etc), I can edit the folder names without hitting up the admin side, and it all works for me. I loved Gallery 2, but it has a lot of issues and takes up more diskspace.

I haven’t looked at Flickr, because I don’t want to use a third party service. I basically need an browser interface for big image files on my own server.

Will report back when I’ve tested the scripts…

Ah, I misunderstood what you meant by “separate gallery”. I took that to mean “separate from the website”. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to both methods.
I doubt, for instance, if you Googled “network geek” you have my gallery listed quite as prominently as it is had I used something other than Flickr. But, of course, there are many, many reasons not to let someone else host those photographs.

I’m still trying to decide what to do for my newest, and lamest, website, jkhoffman.com That’s the primary reason I’m interested in how, and what, gallery gets chosen here.
So, thanks in advance! ??

I doubt, for instance, if you Googled “network geek” you have my gallery listed quite as prominently as it is had I used something other than Flickr.

I would disagree ?? I’ve made many gallery sites, all of which beat out Flickr etc for google searches. It’s just SEO and Gallery, ZenPhoto and Coppermine are all pretty good at that.

If you like WordPress, ZenPhoto’s the most ‘like’ it, has good enough integration, gets the job done. Gallery2 is more ‘professional’ but it’s too big for me. Gallery3 can die in a fire (sorry, I hated it). Coppermine was (four years ago) very kludgy to me.

You mentioned not wanting to use a external service, but I thought I would mention Smugmug anyway. Its very cheap and can be customized to look very nice. Plus the bandwidth and space are on a different server (amazon’s s3 service).

Otherwise I thought coppermine wasn’t too bad. If you don’t mind a little extra work I really like Simpleviewer, you’ll have to make the gallery using Picasa or something like that, but it is a good system for simply displaying photos.

I doubt, for instance, if you Googled “network geek” you have my gallery listed quite as prominently as it is had I used something other than Flickr.

I’m actually becoming kinda anti-SEO. I don’t want just anybody to find my sites; I want a relevant audience. That whole Google paradigm is kinda collapsing at the moment, because only a few big agreggators like Google really profit from it.

You mentioned not wanting to use a external service, but I thought I would mention Smugmug anyway.

Well, don’t… ??

I distrust third party services for similar reasons. Why is it a good thing to have bandwidth and space on a different server? My Bluehost hosting contract already offers virtually unlimited space/bandwidth. Why would I go to Amazon? Or SmugMug? Or Picasa?

Amazon couldn’t make online retail profitable, so they started selling their IT infrastructure. Cloud computing is bogus. Clueless MBA’s are dazzled by the buzzword, but serious IT departments aren’t buying it.

Sure, a lot of these web 2.0 services are free, but at some point they will have to make money to stay in business.

In this case I’m not even looking to build a public gallery. It’s for clients only. I’ll probably even put it behind a login. I’m not looking for flashy ways to display my pictures to the world (Simpleviewer). I need a PHP script to present hi-res pictures on my server for download to clients.

Ah, what you’re looking for is entirely different, I think, than what most people are looking for when we look for a gallery. In your case, I certainly would NOT want a third-party host to have the photographs. Makes total sense.

As to the level that SEO is snake-oil, well, any ranking I have is a natural hit. No special stuff done. Which, incidentally, was my point. Trying to be found by anyone searching, as opposed to clients you already have, lends itself to trying to be found by those aggregators. To me, search equals advertising. But, all that is completely aside from the question at hand.

I do have limited bandwidth and diskspace, and multiple sites on that one account, so those questions are all very relevant. Still, when you decide, I’d really love to see your implementation of it, if possible, before you lock it down.

OK, tried ZenPhoto and Plogger.

Plogger is 1.6 Mb, ZenPhoto 15 Mb. Plogger does basically the same things ZenPhoto does and the structure is very similar. Both handle FTP upload of hi-res/5-6 Mb photos fine.

But ZenPhoto is much more sophisticated and user-friendly, has many more features, effective plugin for WordPress integration, etc.

Despite what this review says ZenPhoto also has a sophisticated feature to protect the original images.

I haven’t found a feature to add download links yet, instead of opening the full images.

For more regular purposes NextGen Gallery is probably still the best option. The main reason I had to find an alternative was that it chokes on hi-res, 5-6 Mb files.

Speaking for ZenPhoto only:

That review is from over a year ago. Zen’s upgraded a couple minor releases since then and fixed a lot ??

Assuming you want to link a WordPress post to a downloadable image…

The plugin ZenPhotoPress will allow you to link to the inserted element:
* Link to an image
* Link to an album
* Link to custom URL

So you could custom URL it to the download.

If you just want to add a ‘download’ link to the image page, I put this in my image.php for my ZenPhoto theme:

<div id="fullsize_download_link">
     <em><a href="<?php echo htmlspecialchars(getFullImageURL());?>" title="<?php echo getBareImageTitle();?>"><?php echo gettext("Original Size:"); ?> <?php echo getFullWidth() . "x" . getFullHeight(); ?></a></em>
     </div>

I put it in the section <div id="image_data"> </div>, just above my call to the image description. Works nicely so my layout is easy to maintain, but if someone wants the High Res copy of the photo, they can snag it easily.

Thanks for that download link code, Ipstenu!

‘Full image protection’ (under Options > Image) also has a ‘download’ option in the pulldown menu that “forces a download dialog rather than displaying the image”. It’s puts in the same download link.

Nice transparant templating system as well. ??

I know you’re still in the implementation phase, but how do you feel about how these galleries integrate into WordPress? I checked out Ipstenu’s site and, while the gallery itself is nice, I don’t like that it takes you out of the rest of the site navigation so much. Thoughts?

If you were looking at my ipstenu.org site, yeah. Intentionally, my gallery isn’t designed like my blog. I’m slacking on fixing that ??

Look at https://jorjafox.net and https://gallery.jorjafox.net/ instead, and you won’t be able to tell much of a difference between gallery and blog. And wiki. And forum.