I’ve used Gallery2 since possibly late 2006. Definitely since 2007. My installation was never upgraded to the very last release. I didn’t think it was necessary and upgrades are a pain.

My Gallery2 release blew up October 2014 while I was traveling in New Orleans. That last release might have helped. It occurred during an OS upgrade by my web host. Everything else came through OK. Not Gallery2. I tried to fix it but was not able to.

I decided to move to a totally different platform since Gallery3 was no longer being developed. It seems that the shift toward social media sites for things like pictures has removed all interest in development for these types of web applications. I find this sad but I am one of the few people not interested in social media.

I picked WordPress since I was very familiar with it and knew I could put together a platform for hosting my pictures. I found a theme that had a similar color scheme as Carbon had for Gallery2: dark gray and gray.The only thing about the theme I found problematic is the custom menu requires mouseover to expand and the pages widget does not have a tree structure.

I’ve wanted to have a gallery that used the Highslide lightbox since 2008 when I first saw it. I absolutely love this lightbox. I’ve seen nothing since that has similar features.

One concern with WordPress as a gallery is that it was not built for the task. A great many features standard across most gallery applications are just not available. One of these is directory management. I prefer to organize my photos in a very hierarchical manner. I want them organized on the webpage this way. I want the files organized this way. I was able to solve the file locations issue only partially. On the backend, WordPress still organizes the files by upload date but in the admin interface, I found a plugin called WP Media Folder that lets me organize them logically. I use TablePress to manually create thumbnails that link to pages for organizing the structure to the visitor. It is very manual and a pain in the ass but I get the results I want.

I wanted an easy way for the most recent pictures I’ve uploaded to be seen and found the Easy Image Display plugin. It puts the last arbitrary number of uploaded images in a widget or post.

I looked for a gallery plugin for WordPress to handle the gallery specific functions but never found one I liked. It turns out the built in gallery fits my needs well enough. I can get a single column at the right “thumbnail” size with click to expand from Highslide. My goal has always been to allow my visitors to scroll very quickly through the pictures and only click the ones they have any interest in. A feature I was not able to implement is EXIF data. This is only of interest to other photographers but really who else might visit an actual web gallery of a photographer.