In my continuing quest to find some decent gallery software to exhibit my photos, I’m on the move again.
Having upgraded to the latest version of Coppermine I discovered I can no longer upload photos. The supporters on the coppermine forums (swamped by issues with uploading which indicates a problem with their software) are unhelpful, arrogant and unfriendly these days in my opinion. Fair enough it’s all done on a voluntary basis and they are probably just frustrated by the kinds of requests for help and the way they have to repeat themselves, but they really should take a step back and look at what is fundamentally wrong with the software and their attitude which is leading to these frustrations.
So what next? I have looked at Gallery before but that seemed to lack features that Coppermine had hence I’d moved to Coppermine in the first place. Though I believe it’s moved on a bit now.
Recently I’ve been looking at Exhibit Engine. This is a package that tries to address everything missing from the likes of Coppermine and Gallery for the photographer, concentrating on specifics such as how a photo was taken, the shooting data, equipment and the work-flow used. It gives a more professional feel and the level of information you can provide per photo is more comprehensive. The comment and rating system has a more professional approach too, by asking the voter to rate on different technical and artistic factors. Also EE forces a comment to be left with a rating which helps avoids abusive, random or accidental voting.
Exhibit Engine is in beta at the moment (as of writing at version 1.5 RC4) and has some rough edges and complexity to set up. The guy behind it (who is a one man band) is friendly and helpful when asking questions. Customer service is always a plus in my book :D.
So I’ve set up EE and started loading some of my photos into it. The results of this can be seen here…
Something I am very impressed with is the ability to take the EXIF information and guess (fairly accurately) what equipment was used even when that information isn’t in the EXIF, in particular the lens information. Other systems require you to manually enter this information.