photography

Now that Gallery 3.0 is in the beta phase of its software development, I feel it's safe to talk about the new features users can expect out of this open source web-based photo album organizer. Now I realize that Gallery is not a full content management system, but I also know there are plenty of people out there that think they need a CMS when perhaps what they really need is something a little simpler. For those that want to build a site to display and share their photography I recommend a look at Menalto's Gallery.

The philosophy behind Gallery 3 development is to make the web application easy and fun to customize with a big focus on usability. The developers have made every effort to make it much easier for the casual developer to hack on the product and do some really cool things with the software. The emphasis is on making simple, frequent tasks quick and easy.

New features and enhancements in Gallery 3 include:

• Support for upgrading to further releases
• Full HTTPS support
• Use the EXIF caption (information provided by your digital camera) as the photo description

The developers of Gallery, an online photo-album organizer, have officially announced the start of Gallery 3.  I have to say they have a very aggressive release date for the release of version 3.0.

Those of you that have been paying attention know that something is going on! At the Gallery Sprint a few weeks ago, we made a lot of decisions and got the ball rolling on a complete rewrite which we've decided to call Gallery 3. Development of new features on Gallery 2 has been frozen, Gallery 1 is now a completely separate project "Jallery", and the Gallery team is now busy at work on Gallery 3. It's definitely not ready to run on your website yet but we've set the ambitious goal of having a 3.0 release by February 1, 2009 and are on track to meet that goal.

Feature requirements for Gallery 3.0 can be found on the Gallery wiki page.

Gallery 2.3, an open source "photo album organizer", has been released. Lot of new features in this version of the Gallery 2.x branch.  Some of the new features and enchancements include:

• Slideshow module now uses PicLens to provide a rich, full screen slideshow.
• Comment module now offers spam moderation and Akismet support.
• New email notification module allowing users to configure events they wish to get notified for.
• Support for SQLite 3.x as a database backend.
• New SnapGalaxy module for prints from snapgalaxy.com.
• New Jpegtran module to support rotation and cropping of jpeg images.
• New database backup features.
• Themes can now override module template files.
• Performance and stability improvements.
• User interface improvements.
• Security improvements resulting from internal and external audits.

Confession: I never knew how much there was to Photoshop until my wife, the photographer, decided to move over to the digital age. During the course of our marriage, while she has excelled in the art of digital photography, as well as Photoshop, I have remained the amateur.

Luckily, Corrie Haffly at Sitepoint has started a series of articles for geeks like us who still think all we need on our Websites is any of the eight colors we learned when we were five. (By the way, I got a star on my paper in kindergarten...red, blue, yellow, green, orange, purple, brown, and black!)

The visual style that has come to be associated with the term Web 2.0 has exploded in popularity; everywhere you look, corporate sites, web service sites, ecommerce sites, and even personal blogs are making use of clean, minimalist design coupled with fancy graphic effects. If you'd like to jump on the bandwagon, this is the article for you!

• Fixed WebDAV for OS X / GNOME clients - Items are now recognized as images
• Fixed fallback theme / theme reset functionality
• Fixed PHP error in fetchWebPage() on too many redirects
• Fixed rewrite rule for embedded core.DownloadItem
• Fixed Upgrade Code for IBM DB2 / MS SQL Server

With the first release of two release candidates, Gallery 2.2 will be arriving before you know it. Some of the new features in Gallery 2.2 will include:

• Downloadable Plugins
• Added support for themes to display dynamic albums.
• Watermarking changes
• New themes: Carbon and Ajaxian
• New WebDAV module to mount Gallery as network device on your computer. This allows you to easily manage your Gallery with any WebDAV client like Windows Explorer.
• New module to send Ecards.
• New Digibug module for prints from digibug.com.
• Added support for Flash Video and Windows ASF video.
• Photo auto-rotation based on camera sensors or on settings from other applications.

You can download the release candidate from the Gallery 2 Download Page. More information about Gallery 2.2 RC 1 can be found on Gallery's original announcement.

"Gallery 1.5.5 is now available for download. This is primarily a bug fix release, fixing a handful of bugs reported by users and some discovered by our testing team. Even though this release contains no security fixes, we recommend that all users of Gallery 1.5.4 and earlier upgrade to this release to be as bug free as possible."

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