I’ve become increasingly unhappy with my Gallery solution. Gallery 2 is feature-rich, yes, but at the cost of being a pain in the ass to use in terms of administrative interface, and customizing it is… well, painful to say the least. All those promises of making it easier to customize than Gallery 1 haven’t really panned out, in my humble opinion. In short, I’m not happy.

So, I’ve spent snippets of free time over the past few months looking at alternatives… most of which suck just as much or more. I found one that I really liked (ZenPhoto), but discovered to my chagrin that it has absolutely NO support for multiple users, which is unfortunately a dealbreaker right now. Reading through their forums, it’s on their possible to-do, but isn’t a high priority (argh!). Razzifrazzin’ sonuva…

So the search continues. I found another lovely app (Tableau) that looks PERFECTLY suited to my needs (including multi user support, huzzah!), but it requires Ruby on Rails, which my current web host doesn’t support. I’m otherwise very happy with FutureQuest, so I’m reluctant to leave them over this, especially since there really aren’t better options right now… if or when I finally do leave FutureQuest, it’ll be because I’m co-locating my own server (probably running OS X 10.x Server, replete with my own jabber and calendar servers), which is currently decidedly outside the realm of cost feasibility.

So, I’m putting the call out: anyone know any nifty gallery solutions? I’m looking for something that is lightweight and easily customizable, but also has the features I need like multi-user support, and will run in a LAMP environment? I’m aware of the ones currently up on OpenSourceCMS already, and am unhappy with the offerings, to be honest. Frankly, it’s this frustration that I think has caused more people to move to collective gallery solutions like Flickr. I really don’t want to go that direction, though, unless there’s no other choice. Damnit, I LIKE being able to host my own stuff.