Gallery is back!

I recently blogged about switching web hosts.  6 weeks into it, I'm still pretty happy with Hostgator, they're a lot more Drupal-friendly, even with the cheapest hosting package (which is cheaper than Powweb).  I've had a couple reliability issues, and they say that's what you get on a shared server, but Hostgator still advertises 99.99% uptime and I haven't been getting that in the past couple weeks.  And it freaked out a client, which is not cool.  If Hostgator can't improve their reliability I might jump ship again.

I previously blogged about the transition itself, which was pretty easy.  One casualty, however, was my wonderful online gallery.  I've been posting photos online for over 10 years, long before there was a Picasa or even a Flickr.  When those services appeared, I already had so many photos on my own server that it didn't make sense to switch, although I did migrate from Coppermine to Gallery 2 in 2006.

But this time, I was switching servers, so it wasn't as easy to bring gigabytes of photos with me.  I looked into Flickr and Picasa and realized they're not for me.  Both services cater to two groups: light amateurs with only a few dozen photos, or professionals with a budget.  Picasa has a lifetime limit of 1 GB, which is like nothing to me, and Flickr has a monthly upload limit of 100 MB, which is even less.  At that rate it would take me a year to re-upload my entire gallery.  (It's not even my entire digital photo album, just the parts I've put online.)

The solution: re-upload the album via ftp, and display it using Gallery 2, just like I was doing before.  Both Drupal and Gallery have come out with new versions, but they don't talk to each other yet, so I'm still stuck with Drupal 6 and Gallery 2.  It's not really a bad solution, it's served me very well for the past 5 years.  In fact, it's serving me even better now; I fixed a long-standing bug I had before.

I've started with some photos of Nathan and some photos of my hobby.  None of these are new, sorry.  But they are online again!  The 69th gallery works too, although it still needs a little work.

J<