Review of Coppermine, Piwigo, & Gallery photo management software

Reviews and discussion of major website creation software. Examples are Wordpress, gallery software, phpBB. This forum is for presenting educated opinion on the software in question. Trashing software is quite alright so long as you have some perspective. Newbies welcome. The forum is not for debugging, configuration, problem solving, or things of that nature.
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jake-boards
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Review of Coppermine, Piwigo, & Gallery photo management software

#1

Post by jake-boards » Sun Apr 28, 2019 10:05 pm

I need some gallery software that can handle large images, movies, and has a decent search and tagging ability. I'm on A2hosting shared web hosting, with 12 packages to choose from. Gallery version 3.0.9 is the top rated. Coppermine 1.6.06 is the third rated. I did an initial run-through on the software list to get to just 3.

The Gallery project locked me out, almost immediately. That, coupled with the fact that it's not being developed anymore (thanks wikipedia) and looks goofy, makes me pass on this. It's really rare that I come back to something that locks me out of a base setup.

Piwigo has a weird spelling. It looks like Plwigo on most fonts. It installed properly through cpanel. The admin page takes me on a tour of the product. Great idea. Bad execution. They didn't provide dummy data to show how to configure. They have a number of tours, none of which can be completed because there's no dummy data. What's the point of a tour if you have to work to get the tour?

So, here's my first complaint with all this software I'm seeing. They are wedded to the idea that a photo gallery has "albums". It has to have albums, the way a file system has to have little file cabinets to store files. It's really a 1980s mentality at work here. Maybe I should use wiki software? I can already see that piwigo has security issues. It allows users to register and even offers to email the admin when they do. And of course, registered users can customize and leave comments. All well and good. But there's no way to control who registers. What's the point in having a website where you can't control who gets to do what. I can see this will lead to a huge amount of abuse.

There are a lot of plugins. It's a wall of plugins, not grouped by function. The obvious security options are obvious by now, for the last 10 years for sure. And yet.... big scavenger hunt to find them. This package has some fantastic plugins, if they work, but it's absolutely overwhelming. Multiple options for security. No plan. I'm sure you can easily generate conflicts. And as is the case in the modern world, you only get to see the glossy color brochure and never get a straight answer how they plan to accomplish these things.

Piwigo has a templating system. With no explanation of how to use it. Same thing for Themes. The interface looks like nothing else I've ever set up.
There is a small "Help Me" option to the upper right. This takes you to massively incomplete instructions. After looking through the plugins, I have no confidence they do much. This is getting boring. Time to switch packages.

Coppermine seems to be aimed at albums and current images. Hopefully this has a theme or template system where I can reconfigure. It's also popping up an annoying link to news from coppermine-gallery.net. This is a huge no-no. Software that forces every user to visit the controlling site is just controlware. So, Coppermine is minimal controlware, so far as I know. Whenever I see this shit happening, I have to edit the code to see what else they have their paws on.

The actual instructions for configuring Coppermine can be found here:https://coppermine-gallery.net/docs/curr/en/index.htm. This is also available from the Information->Documentation menu.

Right away, reading the Coppermine documentation page, I can tell this is well-written. It opens with the security options, does a basic explanation as to how things are organized, tells you what javascript components are going to be used, then goes into features. Even if this software is a bomb, the documentation is a hit. Of course, after I write this, I hit a snag... you need to look at https://coppermine-gallery.net/docs/cur ... disclaimer to see what to configure to actually make the Gallery work. However, nowhere does it tell you where these options are to be set. And you need to do this first, before you add anything.

There's an unadvertized special in the interface design. The dropdown menus don't work as one expects. Each dropdown has a hidden element at the top. So, if you click the gear icon Config menu, it takes you to the hidden "Gallery Configuration" that's discussed in the documentation.

Once you make it here, it's pretty self-explanatory if you have set anything up before. If not, the docs are pretty good. Also, click the ? icon to the far right to get the documentation for each individual setting. There is, in fact, a themes directory where you can edit the examples to customize. The default theme is called "curve" and wisely uses CSS menus instead of javascript. The settings are a little touchy, but you get feedback at the top of the page about which settings worked and which settings failed (need to be reviewed.).

I'm not even sure how Coppermine looks yet, but it's clearly well documented, has the right security options (whether they work or not is another question), and I'm just plain tired of blogging this thing. So, I'm going to post now and edit later to continue the review.
word count: 915

jake-boards
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Re: Review of Coppermine, Piwigo, & Gallery photo management software

#2

Post by jake-boards » Sat May 04, 2019 10:34 pm

TIFF file support is not available out of the box. A number of my images are in tif format. I was hoping for an easy fix, but no. I'm having serious problems getting files larger that 2MB to upload. I changed the max filesize to 2GB, but it seems to ignore it. It's apparently a limitation of my php.ini file, which I can't edit because I'm on shared hosting. This would seem like it's going to be a huge problem for something that deals with lots of large file. It's gaping hole in the documentation.

How hard would it be to tell people:
1) Create a custom php.ini file in the root directory of your coppermine website.
2) Add the lines
upload_max_filesize = 200M
post_max_size = 201M

Adjust accordingly to set your maximum upload size.

Of course, it didn't work. Why should it. Nobody needs more than 640k. It's looking like this is a deal breaker. The thing I'm straining to understand is that phpinfo says I can have 8MB file uploads. I specifically asked for 200MB. However, coppermine still thinks the limit is 2MB.

I'm not going to put up with a software package less capable than html links. With all the time I've spent trying to debug this BS, I could have written a custom HTML & CSS page for all my images. No sweat. I'm going to take a break from this package to evaluate other options. Zenphoto is next. After that, it's straight wiki software. I really don't like the straightjacket of albums, file type restrictions, intermediate sizes, etc. I can build all those things by hand in less time than I've taken to put up a few images.
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