Of the galleries I have seen so far the ones I like best are:
ExhibitEngine (The new version seems to have everything you need. Including speed. But I am afraid the backend is way more complicated than ZenPhoto)
Plogger (The best upload I have seen in ANY gallerysoftware!)
ZenPhoto (looks good from the features. Could not get it to run yet. But it has a promising future)
This is what I need from a gallerysoftware:
- Public and private galleries.
I want to keep family photos closed for the public. So the picture folder should be possible to put outside of the public_html folder. And the passoword system should be really solid.
- RSS - in place already in ZP as far as I understand.
- Easy to integrate with WordPress and Joomla.
- Easy uploading - Plogger has perfection here.
- Watermarking
- Ability to prevent users from seeing and linking to the full size of the pic.
- IPTC support. No need to enter info two times.
- Ability to decide what info I want to show. The rest should be hidden unless the viewer want to see it.
- The structure I make in the gallery should be reflected in the folder structure on the server. I do not want all pictures in one folder.
- Pictures should be resized on upload if they are too big.
- An admin setting where you can easily click on folders that should or should not be included in robot search. This setting should then generate the robots.txt file. One small way to control if your pictures are sucked into Google to be spread around or not.
- A plugin for WP so you can run a random pic in the sidebar would be nice.
- Good statistics. I do not care about having the statistics in the frontend. But it is good to be able to log in to the backend and see what pictures has been viewed most, referrers etc.
- Spamcontrol for the commenting.
- Usergroups and levels so I can control who get to see what. Does not need to be complicated. Just create groups, add users to groups and decide on each folder what group can see it.
I will add to this list as I can think of more...
A gallery need a lot of powerful features even if the interface should be simple, easy and elegant. It is just a matter of hiding those features for the eyes that do not want to see them.
Zenphoto
