Tin
-
06:22:38 pm on January 13, 2006 | # |
Have you ever wanted something, and maybe you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted, but when you finally got it, it was way more than what you thought you wanted?
I would equate it to getting the wrong laptop. Maybe you see this monster laptop that’s even more powerful than your desktop. You’ve explored your options, and yeah, there are less powerful laptops out there, but they have their advantages. They’re lighter and easier to carry around, but you want the power. At least you thought you did. Two weeks into it, you realize lugging it around sucks, because it weighs more than your calculus and biology book, and now you’re lugging all three in your backpack. Sure, the laptop is nice. You can play graphic-intense video games, it supports a high resolution, maybe even one of those new crisp and clear laptop screens, but man, it sucks battery life like no other, and dang, it’s heavy. You think to yourself, “Man, I should’ve gotten something lighter, something a little more mobile, something with a battery that lasts longer than 75 minutes.”
As far as gallery software is concerned, I had the high-end laptop. I was using Gallery.
Let me just start off by saying that Gallery is very nice. It has all kinds of features right out of the box. It does almost everything I want it to do, and has a ton of more things I don’t want it to do. All of it is configurable, meaning you can turn off the features you don’t want. Best of all, it’s completely free.
But that’s the thing, it does everything, and everything is just too much. The folder size for the typical Gallery installation is 13 MB. THIRTEEN. That’s huge. I wanted gallery software that did the essentials, but they had to do them well. Beyond well. I wanted something that was slick, something that made you go, “Whoa, that’s pretty cool.” Something that gave you the same feeling when you used Gmail for the first time.
Then came zenphoto.
Well, I had actually been doing a decent amount of gallery research, and zenphoto had stood out. The problem was, at the time, it was still missing some important features I wanted (like album and image sorting), so I stuck with Gallery. However, all this time, I’ve been keeping track of zenphoto development, seeing when they were going to release their next beta. They finally released 1.0 beta this past Wednesday, and the release contained all of the features I wanted that were missing in 0.9 beta. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to convert my photo galleries over to zenphoto.
Administering photo galleries has never been easier. You can upload a folder of pictures into the albums folder (via FTP), and zenphoto will automatically create the album for you. You can’t do that in Gallery, not unless you use Gallery Remote, a Java client you have to install on your computer. It also has drag and drop sorting of albums and images. You can also do instant edits to titles and descriptions without having to go through the admin interface. Super slick.
This really won me over. A person on the zenphoto forum asked if the developers could integrate lightbox into the albums (slick, isn’t it?). They said it wouldn’t be part of the release, but it was easy enough to integrate it yourself. They were right. I was able to modify the default theme to support lightbox, and the gallery migration was complete.
So what’s old and what’s new? Besides the obvious change in gallery software, there are two additional albums, one of my high school graduation back in 2002, and one of the high school Christmas party we had at Muc Su Duong’s (or Pastor John’s, whichever is more comfortable for you) this past December.
I’ve been hesitant to post the graduation pics for a while now, but I’m not really sure why. In a way, they are a bit personal, because my mom was quite sick at the time, but she was able to get out of the hospital just in time for my graduation ceremony (I assure you, she is doing well). That meant a lot to me. In general, the people that came to my graduation, that meant a lot to me. Some of them were my brother’s friends, and growing up, I was just Mikey’s kid brother who always wanted to tag along. This time, they tagged along for my graduation, so that was pretty cool. There wasn’t even an extravagant dinner party, just some good ol’ BBQ at Spring Creek. Strangely, there was a mini LAN party afterwards, you know, back when LAN parties actually meant something. Now, it’s just easier to get it yourself or to play over the Internet. Overall, good times.
This post has gone too long. Enjoy the new gallery.
Tina 2:54 pm on January 18, 2006 | #
Hmmm nice and slick indeed. I think I’ll give it a whirl.