Using WordPress/Drupal/Joomla for your photo gallery?
Yesterday as any usual day we received a support request on the Piwigo forum. This user has been trying to create his photo gallery with Drupal and obviously, it was not as easy as expected:
After spending months fighting with various Drupal gallery modules, I finally gave up and after some research ended up with Piwigo. So far, I am very impressed. I must say that I’ve been able to get a LOT more done in 4 hours with Piwigo than I could in 6 months with Drupal’s gallery and image modules! Way to go!
Don’t understand my post wrong, I really appreciate Drupal or Joomla for creating an average to very large website or WordPress to create a small website or a feature rich blog. Drupal, Joomla and WordPress are great softwares with impressive feature sets and active communities.
My opinion is that if your website is mainly a photo gallery, the best option is to choose a photo gallery software and among the best photo gallery software you’ll find Piwigo, but not only: ZenPhoto and Menalto Gallery are also in the place. Piwigo is designed to manage photo galleries, only other photo gallery softwares can be seriously compared to Piwigo when it comes to managing (large) photo sets.
Gallery modules integrated into WordPress/Drupal/Joomla are nice and certainly good enough for the vast majority of WordPress/Drupal/Joomla users and I don’t say this option is a bad choice. It all depends on the main use of your website. I have seen many great photo galleries designed with a WordPress core + photo oriented theme and the result is top quality most of the time.
You know what’s good with Opensource Softwares? The user can give a try and decide by himself!
Pierrick on Piwigo 
I concur. Drupal, Joomla and other such portals are excellent for general purpose portals and have a very large user supported development community. The portals themselves provide a broad platform that can be customized using any of the thousands of modules that are available. For instance, there are close to a hundred modules that can be used in various combinations to build photo galleries. However, none of the modules or combinations provide a complete, immersive gallery experience without additional hacking of the modules and php coding.
Folks who have a lot of time to devote to building the perfect gallery from scratch and are proficient in PHP have been able to hack their way to a good-enough photo gallery; for the vast majority who need a quick and easy way to setup an online photo gallery on their own hosted domain, Drupal and its modules are an exercise in frustration and futility.
MenaltoGallery looks good on paper; however, it is unbelievably bloated. At one point, even its creator accepted that the codebase deserved a rewrite. However, the focus has been to dump more and more features on to the existing codebase. Hopefully, v3 will be better.
I played around with a few other PHP-based galleries that appeared easy to install and maintain, looked slick and provided an appealing user interface. With Piwigo, my search is over. Took me a couple of hours to install, configure, tweak and upload a few albums (around 500 images). It was ridiculously easy to make some albums private and the rest public, create groups and grant access to groups.
I was pleasantly surprised to find the lead developer answer questions within minutes of their being posted on the forum. I cannot recall seeing this level of support even for paid software, let alone free software. Granted I’ve been using Piwigo for just a few days; however, so far, my impressions are very favorable.
MediocreFred
October 21, 2010 at 6:40 pm
Thank you for your detailed comment MediocreFred
> MenaltoGallery looks good on paper; however, it is unbelievably bloated.
> At one point, even its creator accepted that the codebase deserved a rewrite.
I could also say that Piwigo core needs a rewrite. Some part of it need a rewrite and we often rewrite things. For example, I think the category permissions have been rewritten twice to meet optimal performance (last rewrite was at least 5 years ago I think). The synchronization process was rewritten maybe 3 times for performances and compliancy with remote sites. More recently, the theme architecture was rewritten for Piwigo 2.1 (that was 6 months ago) to make it simpler.
What I mean is “don’t judge a software because it was rewritten” 🙂
In Piwigo 2.2, we will rewrite the user upload to get an advanced upload form, just like the one you have in your administration panel.
> Took me a couple of hours to install, configure, tweak and upload a few
> albums (around 500 images)
Which method did you choose for installation?
* automatic installation with SimpleScripts/Softaculous
* Debian package
* netInstall
* archive download/local extract/FTP transfer
Which method did you choose to add photos?
* web form with multiple files and progress bar
* remote client (pLoader, Jiwigo, Digikam…)
* FTP transfer + synchronization
> I was pleasantly surprised to find the lead developer answer questions
> within minutes of their being posted on the forum. I cannot recall seeing
> this level of support even for paid software, let alone free software.
Sometimes it takes more than “minutes” 🙂 but yes, I like contact with users and I appreciate that Piwigo helps webmaster to create their photo gallery with less efforts!
plg
October 22, 2010 at 10:30 pm
i used piwigo as my image gallery. its simple and easy to use. plugins and themes are really easy to deploy. i think the (-) thing in this platform is creating the additional page. if the page can be created as one menu, it would be great. since i new to this platform and still determining which is the best among piwigo, gallery and zendphoto i could only comment that way.
could you show me the best theme in showing images, tabbed menus without loosing facebook plugin?
like i used in
http://pijatanstudio.com
i used blancmont xl theme with header image substituted
Julis Suryadi
October 22, 2011 at 10:27 pm
Hi Julis Suryadi,
Here is the trick to add a “top level” menu :
1) install and activate plugin Advanced Menu Manager
2) on screen [Administration > Plugins > Advanced Menu Manager > Personalised menu], Add a new block and fill as follows :
* Description : my top level menu
* Block title : <a href=”./index.php?/page/1″ rel=”nofollow”>My Page</a>
* Block content : <span></span>
(the block content must not be empty, otherwise the menu won’t be displayed)
plg
October 24, 2011 at 9:06 am
Thanks for your kind answer.
Piwigo is the Best!!
Julis Suryadi
October 25, 2011 at 1:21 am
I totally concur too, and for having had the same issues as the ones described by many Drupal and WordPress users, Piwigo is THE best web photo gallery…
As a suggestion, wouldn’t it be nice to have a “Piwigo” Drupal module (like PiwigoMedia for WordPress, unfortunately not well maintained)? This would allow users to easily embbed their favorite Piwigo albums (or tag marked pictures) in their Drupal website, and avoid them to look for Drupal based solutions…
ptitwolfy
May 2, 2012 at 12:21 pm
Thank you for your message and support!
I don’t think PiwigoMedia is “not well maintained”. I agree that a Drupal module would be great 😀 If you know any Drupal developer interested, I’ll be glad to help him/her to communication with Piwigo.
plg
May 2, 2012 at 12:26 pm