Before I moved to Globat, I once had Gallery2 to manage my photo albums. The migration is really a pain of ass. Gallery2 minimum installation is 3.9MB bz2 package, since Globat does not support SSH, I have to upload hundreds of small files via FTP. Thanks to lftp developers, we could resume the mirror action after the server timeout, otherwise it looks like a MI:4. Then I imported the database, and run. Gallery insisted me to go though 20 steps to finish the installation, and Bang, a fresh new gallery without any imported photos.

I thought I made some mistakes somewhere, but I was really bored by the versatile heavy-weight application. I don’t need all those advanced features, I just need a simple, stupid light-weight album, and I found ZenPhoto.

The installation tar ball for ZenPhoto is relatively small, 163K. I followed the INSTRUCTION, modified the zp-config.php fit my database setting, uploaded the files, with just two-step installation, I was done. The management console is quite clean:

since all the trivial work, such as add description for the album and photo is done on the fly in AJAX style. that is really cool.

It took me about 1 hour to integrate ZenPhoto to my Wordpress framework, and another 1 hour to hand tune the CSS to make them match. You can take a look at the final result here. And here is a wonderful wordpress plugin name ZenPress to integrate the albums/photos into your post. I would dig it later.

However there are still some problems I could not solve:

• Annoying mod_write mod_write fails on MSIE, but it works perfect with Firefox. The detailed description is here and here
• Comment redirection does not work When user leave a comment, the page is supposed to redirect to the previous photo page, however, the header function seems not work.

And some features I am missing:

• AJAX/Flash based slideshow
• Password protected albums
• Akismet integration to stop comments spam