I absolutely love the open-source project Gallery2. It’s full-featured, extensible, and compatible with a number of CMS and blogging systems. But all this goodness has a drawback: maintenance. Every month or two I have to backup the database and source files because of a security update. Then I realize I have over 300 MB of images on my host that I should be backing up in the event some yahoo hacks the site.

One day it dawned on me: I don’t have time for this.

Whether Gallery2 is the best thing since sliced bread or not, I take photos for enjoyment and maintaining software doesn’t fall into my definition of fun.

I started to rebuild my photo galleries in Fotki. It doesn’t have all the bells-and-whistles of Gallery2 but they maintain the system, back it up, even provide a means to sell photos and purchase inexpensive prints. After months of rebuilding my photo albums the Fotki-based photo gallery is ready to show.

You may notice the gallery looks nothing like a generic Fotki site. I spent a couple of hours hacking my WordPress theme to work with Fotki’s co-branding feature. Aside from a few errant DIV tags which Fotki needs to fix, it was easy and didn’t require me to learn the syntax of a theme engine.

Finally I can focus on taking great photos, which is after all, the point of a photo gallery.

EDIT: At the moment the photo gallery does not match because I can’t make up my mind about a blog theme. One day I tell you.

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