Lately, I have been in search of a GREAT Joomla image gallery. My first question to Joomla’s core developers is this: Why doesn’t Joomla come with a built in Joomla Image Gallery? It seems like almost every Joomla site I build has an image gallery as a requirement. Furthermore, it seems like an image gallery should be part of ANY Content Management System.
The following is a summary of my search for a GREAT Joomla Image Gallery:
- RSGallery2 This was almost a GREAT Joomla image gallery. It was easy to install, easy to use, and had bulk uploading. The one thing missing was the ability to automatically play a slide show. If it had this ability, I couldn’t find it. Unfortunately, this component seems to have gone out of business because their website is no longer accessible and the Joomla extensions directory says it has been pulled because downloads are no longer available.
- Expose This is a nice Flash Gallery. Pretty easy to use. But it has some very specific server requirements that prevent it form working correctly on most standard LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) web hosting platforms. In addition, it was never ported to run natively on Joomla 1.5. As a result, I don’t even consider it anymore.
- Phoca Gallery This gallery seemed to have promise, but like Expose, one important function doesn’t work: BULK UPLOAD. For example, there is a Java uploader and a Flash uploader, and neither will work on my computer. Not sure why the Java uploader doesn’t work, but I heard the Flash uploader doesn ‘t work with Flash 10.x. Plus, there a bug with folder creation that creates error messages and assigns a very strange folder permission to the created thumbnails directory.
- JoomlaGallery Again, a nice gallery with lots of promise…until you start to configure it. There are so many configuration screens that it is VERY CONFUSING. Plus, many of the configurations seem to have NO affect. And, I could not figure out how to get rid of the “Most Popular,” “Most Viewed” etc links at the top and bottom of this gallery. They make it look very amateurish. And again, the Java bulk uploader didn’t work.
In conclusion, there is NO Joomla photo gallery that I can recommend. I ended up using Phoca Gallery, but not because it’s the best. I used it because it had the least amount of bugs. Not exactly a recommendation.
Joomla! Core Developers: Are you listening? Please give us a built in photo gallery. Not having a built in photo gallery in Joomla is like not having a spell checker in a word processor.
