I finally bit the bullet and moved to a full-featured photo gallery tool. In my case, I chose Coppermine. It has quite a few nice features, and I’ve liked the other sites that have implemented it. So, I spent a little while moving over the image folders to the coppermine directory, re-linking the posts with gallery links, and deleting the old qdig installation. While qdig is quick and dirty, there are just too many things that it doesn’t do.
The other reason I decided to do this was that I accidentally blew away a bunch of pictures from old posts that used to be part of a separate ‘photos’ section. I tried finding back-ups, but could only come up with about a quarter of them. So, I’ll be digging up the original photos and re-organizing some of those posts so that they point to the coppermine gallery.
Lastly, I’d like to update the coppermine theme with one that looks like the coffee cup theme I use for the main site. That shouldn’t be too much work … we’ll see. I did find quite a few coppermine themes at Shuttertalk.com.
After downloading it, uploading the package, and trying to configure it to use ImageMagick, I had some trouble so I went to my hosting provider’s support site … almost. I use totalchoicehosting.com, but instead went to totalhosting.com and pestered their tech-support people. To their credit, they did answer my queries promptly, politely, and accurately … despite the fact that I didn’t have an account with them. It turned out that totalchoicehosting has a nice feature where they will auto-install several packages for you. Coppermine turned out to be one of them … so I never had to go through the trouble in the first place.
