Done away with Gallery2
I was convinced that for hosting the images on this blog, Gallery2 was the best option I could get for free. It’s not the first time I’ve been let down by an open source project. Gallery was developed by Bharat Mediratta, who is, for a change, Indian, and so I thought that this would actually be good.
I’d not jump to conclusions and say that Gallery sucks or is buggy. But it certainly isn’t newbie friendly at all. I started facing problems with it since the moment I downloaded the package. Though they do provide an installation guide, but it lacks the trivial things which should have been included; not all people who install this on their servers know how to use SSH or use chmod to change file permissions.
I spent a lot of my precious time in configuring and installing Gallery. No sooner than I completed the installation, I faced another problem - URL rewrites. There was a clash between the Wordpress URL rewrites and the Gallery URLs ( I installed the WPG2 plugin). Some of my post page URLs began to redirect to Gallery pages; others were giving 404 errors. I spent another 2 hours to figure this out. I did reach somewhere, and I solved most of the problem when I got stuck at a point, where I just couldn’t get the Gallery URL rewrite plugin to stay enabled. It just disabled itself moments after I enabled it. All the errors seemed quite random, with no whatsoever reason.
This was more than I could take, so I gave up. I realised that it just wasn’t worth all the hard work. Currently, I’m using a Flickr free account to host my images. Though the free limitations are a pain in the a**, as soon as I have enough money, I will upgrade to a pro account.
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srinivas on 
Prabin Bajracharya on 
Apoorv Khatreja on 
February 20th, 2008 at 4:58 am
that’s why you do not try to integrate two totally different software packages.
February 20th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
why not try a redirect gallery.rutsum.com –>flickr.com/to/your/gallery
February 20th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
What would be the use! I don’t really care about pretty URLs with images.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:45 am
Why on earth do you want to install Gallery to manage photos on your blog? It makes sense if it was a photoblog, but it isn’t, so why should you want that for a normal blog? WP *can* handle images…
February 21st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
There are two kinds of open source packages.
1. Developed by people as a hobby for their own use. They aren’t targeting anybody but themselves and write programs just for the heck of it. This is reminiscent of the BBS/Usenet culture of the early 90’s.
2. Developed by people as a hobby, but meant for widespread use. These guys make sure packages are available for all major platforms, that help and support is readily available, blah blah blah.
The Gallery you’re trying to use falls in category 1. Stuff like Ubuntu, Pidgin and FrostWire fall in category 2.
It’s nobody’s fault really.
February 21st, 2008 at 12:24 pm
If they were developed just as a hobby and are buggy, how in the world did they become so outrageously popular?
February 21st, 2008 at 9:11 pm
It’s more of a ‘problem’ with WP, rather than Gallery2. I think your anger at it is unjustified. It’s quite well known for WP to simply take over trying to manage all queries if you install it in your hosting account’s root folder. Which hosting service do you use anyway? Doesn’t it feature automated setups, say using Fantastico?