WordPress Photo Galleries: State of the WordPress Images War
August 24th, 2007
I'm on a professional WordPress mailing list and this interesting question came up:
I'm using Wordpress 2.2 as a CMS to create a site for a client with a small business. My client wants a portfolio page (not necessrily a WP Page) with a list of thumbnails that will each link to its own "gallery" page which will include multiple photographs with some descriptions. My client is a non-programmer who will need to update and add to the portfolio page on her own.
I've been looking at WPG2 and wondering if this will accomplish my needs. I've seen you can put photos in posts, but can you link those post photos to a WP Page that contains more photos from that category in a gallery style (such as the embedded WPG2)? I will also need descriptions about those photos on that Page. I've looked at other sites that have WPG2 embedded within Pages, but their Pages don't contain photo descriptions beyond the photo title.
Does WPG2 seem a good fit? Or is there another plugin that works better? Or will this not be possible?
Alas, Tracy, all of the galleries in WordPress stink. Both Gallery 1 and 2 are way too top heavy on their own. Mixing Gallery with WordPress would be a fatal PHP cocktail, capable of choking the most powerful server and confusing the most adroit programmer.
We've spent whole days at Foliovision playing around with what's out there in terms of WordPress image plugins and there's nothing I would recommend.
The closest thing to what you want are (listed in order of least amount of work to get something passable):
All have huge problems with URLs and reliability. ZenPhoto is by far the best in terms of simplicity and clean URLs, but it's not well integrated into WordPress just yet.
If you can make any of the above work, without clunkiness and/or very ugly URLs, please comment below. If you find something better, let us know.
At Foliovision, we are currently doing some work on an images plugin but it won't be for larger galleries but for embedding images directly into posts in a simplified workflow. As soon as FV Images is ready, we'll be posting it here.
For the moment, if you want something clean, I'd have to recommend doing it by hand (uploading all the images in both full size and thumbnail and linking and embedding them).
Ecto (available for Windows and Mac) can also be a great help when you have a lot of images to include in a post. The quality of the thumbnailing is poor on Typepad (I have one weblog over there still) but could be handtweaked on WordPress. It can be tricky to get Ecto to play nicely with WordPress built-in XML-RPC.
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