12:38 AM

So, my gallery software signed its death warrant tonight.

I recently upgraded (when will I fucking learn that this is not a worthwhile activity???) the gallery software to fix some bugs and “improve performance.”

Lies, lies, lies. I fixed some of the display problems — but at the cost of being unable to upload files in batches. All of the various upload tools are broken, except for the single-file HTML upload. And it can’t find ImageMagick anymore, even though nothing had changed. Brilliant.

Did I mention today is my son’s birthday? I had over 50 pictures to upload tonight, with grandparents awaiting with bated breath. Still not done. Seriously started looking at other solutions, including rolling my own scripts, because you know what? Screwing around with photo gallery software that people don’t bother to QA is a serious fucking waste of time.

I’ve been on the fence about Gallery since I installed it; I like a lot of the features (particularly the EXIF data and random image block) but there are other things that are just plain awful. It’s overengineered, too hard to modify, and strange things break all the time.

And I’m not just taking about the upload applets and remote gallery applications.

Well, right now I am talking about them. But don’t pick nits.

It’s too bad, because I had someone look at the gallery just last week and comment how cool it is. It is cool, but when it breaks, it breaks hard. Time to find a better way to share photos.

(Suggestions on new gallery options gratefully accepted.)