I haven’t spent a lot of time endorsing things here on my blog, but I have given some high praise to FiOS, TiVo and even Media Temple (who later lost my support).
But I was recently put in a unique situation when I received correspondence from Pierrick in reference to the photo gallery software we’re using over at Strahotski.com.
Never before had I been asked to provide a testimonial for anything.
Running a fansite about an attractive actress pretty much requires a healthy batch of photos and we had been limping along with the NextGen plugin for Wordpress since the inception of the site.
One of the reasons we went with NextGen originally was our lack of enthusiasm for some of the big players out there. Both Gallery and Coppermine seemed clunky and overly complicated, as well as a little bit more difficult to modify than we would have liked.
Fast Forward two years and 2000 pictures later and we found ourself at an impasse. NextGen was getting too hard to navigate, and we still didn’t like Gallery and Coppermine.
This led me to start researching lesser known alternatives in the field until I happened upon Piwigo.
Piwigo is a French-based open source project. Aside from a couple of French classes in high school, I really wasn’t equipped to handle the language barrier.
Luckily for me, the folks at Piwigo have spent a fair amount of time on translations to English and it was more than enough to get me going.
Piwigo was immediately easier to configure and lighter-weight than the gallery software we had tried before. It lets you easily mirror a directory structure of images into a browsable, rateable, commentable web-based gallery of photos.
The feature list for Piwigo is quite strong with the ability to support registered users, uploading of photos, and complete management of the whole thing.
For our needs, we actually ended up stripping out a fair amount of features. Strahotski.com need only support public users who want to peruse the hotness of Yvonne Strahovski, afterall.
Piwigo’s ability to support permalinks for both the galleries and photos was a huge plus. For the purposes of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), human readable links is one of the most important things a site can have.
The package also has a nice extension feature where you can download a number of extensions to give even more flexibility to an already flexible system. These proved to be the hardest to use, however, because a large number of them have not had their readmes translated to English.
As a native English speaker (and only an English speaker) there are some strange choices of wording in the admin interface, and the color scheme of said interface is a bit gawdy at first (black and hot pink ftw!).
These are minor quibbles, however, with an otherwise well-oiled software package that does what you want it to do in the simplest way possible. It is fast, responsive, and easy to configure.
If you find yourself in the same boat that we were in where you don’t like your choices, check out Piwigo. It may be just what you’re looking for!
– Check out the Strahotski.com Gallery for a look at Piwigo in action! –